Lesley A Hall, archivist and historian

Introductory post

2020-12-19T13:06:00.000Z

Decided that it might be a good idea to have a blog linking to my website. People have asked me whether there's any way to find out when pages on my site are updated, so this can be a place where I note changes and updates to Lesley Hall's Web Pages. It's also a place where I could post updates on my academic activities - publications, forthcoming conferences etc I'm attending, media appearances, etc (NB the media don't always tell me when my 30 seconds of fame is going to go out).

Shocking news

2012-03-21T21:43:00.000Z

The Women’s Library is seeking a new home

On Wednesday 14 March, London Metropolitan University’s Board of Governors announced that they will be seeking a new home, custodian or sponsor of The Women’s Library’s collections.

If a new home is not found by the end of December 2012, the Library will move to opening hours of one day per week for a period of three years, with a further review at the end of that period. We will keep you informed of further developments, and we are in the process of contacting key stakeholders.
If you have any suggestions of potential custodians, or any queries, please email us: moreinfo@thewomenslibrary.ac.uk

and London Met are also looking for a new home for the Trades Union Congress Library Collections (statement by Unison London Met Uni Branch.)

A question of shame

2012-03-15T21:50:00.000Z

I was recently very excited by the ideas put forward in David Nash and Anne-Marie Kilday's recent book Cultures of Shames: Exploring Crime and Morality in Britain 1600-1900 (Palgrave 2010), which came to my attention frustratingly late in the day for the purposes of revising Sex Gender and Social Change in Britain since 1880.

I found their critique of a prevalent assumption that a modern 'guilt' culture (in which internal constraints influence behaviour) prevailed over an older 'shame' culture (in which community rituals of shaming enforced social norms) very illuminating. When one thinks about it, of course shame is an enduring human emotion and not just about traditional practices within small communities such as preaching over unmarried mothers or raising 'rough music' against transgressors against community standards. Within a given context, a raised eyebrow might induce tremendous social shame.

Their argument that

Shame... could borrow from old established ideas and idioms while still using the most modern forms of communication technology and social networks with astonishing effectiveness. We would further argue that any definition of shame must clearly appreciate the importance of dynamic interactions between people, institutions and ideas within its influence.

seems compelling to me. Their recuperation of the importance of shame could engage in productive dialogue with Anna Clarke's very useful concept of 'twilight moments' in sexual behaviours (for surely a lot of that is about shame), and also cries out for further consideration of the role of the media in creating shaming narratives.

Three recent posts on the Wellcome blog

2012-03-12T20:54:00.000Z

I seem to have been on a bit of a work-blogging roll in the past couple of weeks:
Extreme traveller of the early C20th
Surprise addition to Blacker papers
War and the psyche

Chelsea neighbours

2012-03-07T20:28:00.000Z

I have just noticed that a blue plaque to commemorate the novelist Jean Rhys is being put on Paulton's House, Paulton's Square, Chelsea, where Rhys lived 1936-38. This was the Chelsea square where Stella Browne was living with her sister Sylvia from 1936 to some time after 1941 (the sisters moved to Liverpool some time during World War II).

One wonders if these two women ever met in the 'fine tree-y garden' of the Square.

Jean Rhys was somewhat younger than Stella but pretty much of the same generation, born well before 1900, but it's hard to imagine the two women having much in common: apart that is from their common experiences of having had abortions at a time when this was illegal. Rhys used her own ordeal (which nearly killed her) in her novel Voyage in the Dark (1934). Stella, who had had three abortions, famously testified to the Birkett Committee that these had neither killed her nor damaged her health, as part of her argument that abortion should be legalised.

The number of allusions I have found in various literary and biographical sources suggests that, while the campaign for legalisation quite rightly focussed on the immense problem of backstreet abortion among working-class women, the spectre of needing to access this operation haunted women writers, bohemians and intellectuals of the interwar period. Few, however, unlike Rhys or Browne, even felt able to make public mentions at that time.

Sir Henry Wellcome's sexual objects

2012-02-24T12:31:00.000Z

On Wednesday I went to the Classical Archaeology Seminar at the Institute of Classical Studies in London at which Jennifer Grove (Univeristy of Exeter) was speaking on 'Henry Wellcome's Classical Erotica: sexually related antiquities collected for the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum in the early C20th'.

This was a very interesting seminar on collecting, museums and the display of objects with sexual connotations. There is something of a perception that Wellcome was a rather undiscriminating collector and that he also acquired a good deal of material of non-medical interest through buying up job lots which dealers had carefully salted with one or two medical items. In fact it turned out that he was specifically acquiring in the area of classical sexually-themed objects and the collection (before it was dispersed) had nearly 1000 of these.

At least in the case of the sexual objects of European Classical Antiquity, it appears that he saw these as falling within wider paradigms of medicine and the maintenance of life and health, in particular the (mostly phallic, but some vulval) amulets and votive objects. These were displayed alongside other amulets within the museum context, at a time, intriguingly, when most museums were still segegrating any material of a sexual nature into secret cabinets and closed collections, rather than displaying it alongside related materials of a non-sexual nature with which it might originally have been associated.

This was presumably possible for Wellcome's museum as he very much positioned it as a place of research and study rather than a public show of entertaining curiosities: although it did receive large numbers of visitors, including school-groups, one wonders whether these were carefully escorted and guided around the galleries rather than running around freely with check-sheets like contemporary school groups in museums.

I was also struck, given that Wellcome's intended audience was the medical profession and scholarly disciplines such as anthropology, by the similarity to the ways in which works of sexology were being published during the same period, with titlepage provisos that they were for the medical/legal professions and serious scholars only (which it is clear a number of booksellers took as guidance). There also seems an intriguing shift from erotic/sexual materials being seen as the province of the gentleman connoisseur (who could bribe his way or at least use social capital to get into secret collections, as well as purchase limited editions of pornographic works) to the realm of the medical and scientific.

However, while the classical sexual objects in Wellcome's collections clearly fit into a model of the religious/spiritual/superstitious approach to medicine, and were about the vital powers of fertility and reproduction, some of the other erotic items (for example the box of Japanese tortoiseshell sex toys currently on display in the Medicine Man exhibition in the Wellcome Collection)

raising rather more puzzling questions about how these fit into the wider paradigms of the collection.

Leo Abse on Stella Browne

2012-02-21T14:40:00.000Z

I recently came across, cited in Stephen Brooke's Sexual Politics: Sexuality, family planning and the British Left from the 1880s to the Present Day (2011: eventual post to follow when I've finished it), Leo Abse's comments on Stella Browne in his autobiography, Private Member (1973).

Abse considered that Stella Browne, Janet Chance and Alice Jenkins, were 'intelligent shrill viragos...[with] pathological disorder... [who] resented their feminine identity'. Stella, he claimed, was a 'loud-mouthed, filthy storytelling ragbag'.

Although at first I was concerned that I had missed a firsthand impression of Stella when writing her biography, on reflection the likelihood that Abse ever met any of these three women, apart possibly from Alice Jenkins, who was the only founder member of ALRA to see the passing of the 1967 Abortion Act, seems minimal in the extreme. He was nearly 40 years younger than Stella (and over 30 years younger than Janet Chance), and their paths could only possibly have crossed in the late 1930s when he was studying law at the London School of Economics (possible, but not very likely). After war service in the RAF, he was based in Cardiff until being elected to Parliament in 1958. Furthermore, his condemnation is expressed in terms so very similar to Mrs Garrett's reported description of Stella quoted in Hindell and Simms, Abortion Law Reformed (1971 - recently reissued in paperback) that the balance of evidence suggests he was working from that source rather than any personal acquaintance.

So I don't think I've let some precious piece of primary evidence escape me, though I suppose this posthumous and hearsay bit of blackguarding might have fitted into my 'Coda' on Stella's afterlife.

Various links

2012-02-17T21:25:00.000Z

A couple of recent posts of mine on the Wellcome Library blog:
Alan Turing and the Ratio Club (for LGBT Month)
Top archives of 2011
Not one of my posts, but of interest: Evenings with a Merman

Collective Artistes: ZHE: [noun] Undefined:

From childhood to adulthood and across continents, this poignant and honest piece of theatre follows the lives of two British Africans living at the crossroads of culture, nationality, gender and sexuality. Humorous yet haunting, this story is told by the characters whose lives are healed and celebrated through the experience.

I attended a read-through of this last summer. Not sure if I'll be able to see any of these stagings.

Roma Routes: EU funded project made up of a partnership of heritage organisations and Roma representatives from Germany, Greece, Slovenia, Romania and the UK. The project aims to encourage intercultural dialogue between Roma and non Roma to promote European Roma cultural heritage.

Website update: Situating Stopes

2012-02-03T15:26:00.000Z

I've just added to my website the paper Situating Stopes: or, putting Marie in her proper place that I gave as keynote at the IHR@90 event, The Birth of the Birth Control Clinic, last March. There don't seem to be any plans afoot to publish the proceedings from this conference (and it doesn't seem as though the projected podcasts of contributions have happened), and anyway, much of the material synthesised in my paper was drawn from things I had already written on Stopes and on the interwar birth control and eugenics movements. However, I think it is a useful overview of some of the issues that continue to surround Stopes and make her a persistently controversial figure.

Archives of voluntary action

2012-02-02T20:35:00.000Z

I see that I have posted before on the vexed issue of the archives of voluntary bodies.

The Voluntary Action History Society is making a concerted effort to make these organisations more aware of their archives and the need to preserve them: Wanted: Champions to safeguard the archives of our charities.

As I commented in a recent post to the Wellcome Library blog, we have acquired over the years a significant collection of archives of voluntary organisations in the medical and health field, and continue to consider the preservation of records from this very important sector a priority.

However, in the course of dealing with this question over the years we have had depressing experiences of records lost or stored in conditions under which they became irretrievably damaged, and encounted instances of very significant institutions which had paid no attention to preserving any details of their history.

Even if records do survive, there may be problems in finding an appropriate repository and in accessing the necessary resources to care for them.

But raising awareness of the importance of archives is a start.

Various forthcoming events

2012-01-30T20:39:00.000Z

International Cultures of Anatomical Collections Conference, Leiden, 15-17 February 2012

The Poynter Lecture at the Wellcome: Shocking Bodies 21 March 2012, 18.00 - 19.00

And also Wellcome related: Classical Archaeology Seminar at the Institute of Classical Studies in London: Jennifer Grove (Exeter) - Henry Wellcome's Classical Erotica: sexually related antiquities collected for the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum in the early 20th C, Feb 22, 5.00 pm in Senate House South Block Room G22/26 (email organiser in advance)

The Queens of Eltham Palace – LGBT History Month | English Heritage

New Histories of Love and Romance, c.1880-1960 25-26 May 2012 University of Glamorgan, Cardiff

'Women in Magazines' conference at Kingston University, London, on 22-23 June 2012

Website updates

2012-01-25T20:28:00.000Z

I've recently made some small updates and additions to Literary Abortion and Victorian Sex Factoids and caught up on Recommended Reading.

I also (now some months ago) put in a fair amount of updating on the Victorian Sexuality Bibliography but it's hard to keep up with what's coming out.

I've recently added the English version of the paper that was the basis for my piece 'Sessualita e storia: obiettive raggiunti e sfide future', 'In Evidenza: Sessualita e storia', Contemporanea, XIV/4, ottobre 2011: Sexuality and history: achievements and challenges. A personal view.

Plus the usual ongoing weekly quotation and such information as I can glean about forthcoming conferences and similar events.

Reprised for this year's LGBT Month

2012-01-24T12:02:00.000Z

My Wellcome Library 'Insights' talk, From Deviance to Diversity on 9th February, at 3 pm

Using a broad range of materials from the Wellcome Library, this Insights session demonstrates the gradual changes in medical and scientific understanding of sexual identity, the bringing about of changes in the law, and the development of more tolerant social attitudes.

Free, but numbers limited.

Links of interest

2012-01-23T20:33:00.000Z

Interview with Hanne Blank, The invention of the heterosexual

On the Voluntary Action History Society blog, an interesting post about Mrs Cecil Chesterton's In Darkest London in which she described her participant observation of facilities for homeless women in the 1920s.

Olive Schreiner Letters Online

Not exactly news

2012-01-22T14:06:00.000Z

I never know whether to be exasperated or depressed when there is some 'news' story on the history of sexuality. It is probably utopian to hope that journalists will not report as exciting new discoveries topics that have not only been the subject of several decades of historical scholarship but significant amounts of revisionism. Partly I am sure this is also to do with publishers' marketing departments trying to find some Unique Selling Point to promote a volume in a competitive marketplace.

I have recently been noticing a number of advance promotional pieces for a new book on the C18th Sexual Revolution.

I am not a C18th historian: on the whole I prefer not to go back much further than 1850 and frankly, I much prefer the C20th, in particular the interwar period, if I had to choose. However, over my years in the field I have come across a fair amount of work on The Long Eighteenth Century and was rather surprised to see this being presented as (ahem) virgin territory in the matter of history of sexuality.

Edward Shorter posited the late C18th as an epoch of sexual liberation way back in the mid-1970s, although his interpretation of the data has been subjected to significant critique since The Making of the Modern Family. Other names associated with the illumination of questions of gender and sexuality in the UK during the Long C18th and indeed paying considerable attention to changes and new developments: Lawrence Stone, Randolph Trumbach, Rictor Norton, Roy Porter, Tim Hitchcock, Amanda Vickery, Julie Peakman, Lisa Cody, Mary Fissell, Michael Stolberg, Thomas Laqueur, Kevin Siena, Norma Clarke, Jane Cox, Dorinda Outram, Alan Macfarlane, Mary Abbott, Ludmilla Jordanova, Julie Gammon... a list which could go on.

Sex Sin and Suffering in paperback

2012-01-20T21:46:00.000Z

I am gratified to be able to announce that Roger Davidson and Lesley A. Hall (eds), Sex, Sin and Suffering: venereal disease and European Society since 1870, first published in 2001, is now available in paperback rather than an hardback edition priced for libraries rather than individuals. It can be purchased directly from Routledge at their website as well as from Amazon (which also has a Kindle edition, but the paperback is significantly cheaper).

The books includes chapters on the UK (with one specifically on Scotland), France, the Netherlands, Russia, Spain, Germany, Italy and Sweden in Europe itself and also addresses the colonial context, both generally and in essays on Uganda and Shanghai, Hong Kong and Singapore.

Julia Laite, Common Prostitutes and Ordinary Citizens: Commercial sex in London, 1885-1960

2012-01-19T21:06:00.000Z

This was a book that I was been ardently anticipating: this was a woefully understudied period in the history of prostitution in the UK, and I have been aware of Laite's work in the area for some years. It does not disappoint.

Its great strength (among many) is its attentiveness to the quotidien business of prostitution and its policing in the metropolis, rather than policy debates and the work of rescue movements. While Laite gives due attention to the various government interventions, both actual legislation and the work of commissions and committees, she is always focused on how developments reflected what was going on on the street and how they impacted the way sex work was regulated.

What becomes clear is the enormous diversity of practices, both in the ways women engaged in exchanging sexual acts for hire and in the means the authorities took to, if not prevent this, to keep it from becoming a perceived source of public annoyance. Since actually trading sex for money is not illegal in the UK, the endeavour to control it took various forms, and Laite does a masterly job of showing the means the police used to harry working women. Besides the oft-criticised 'solicitation' charge - whereby a woman already known to be 'a common prostitute' could be arrested and fined for 'soliciting to the annoyance of the public', even if nobody testified to being actually annoyed - various other strategies could be deployed. During the Second World War, for example, prostitutes using taxis to pick up clients and as a place to have intercourse with them could be prosecuted under wartime edicts concerning wastage of petrol.

The work also demonstrates that despite all the attempts of police, magistrates and moral reformers to designate the 'common prostitute' as a being apart, the boundaries were always fuzzy and women sex workers were part of larger communities and had other identities. Depicted in the media usually either as pathetic victims or scheming harpies, these women - many of whose stories can be recuperated from documentary sources - were doing their best to get by in a harsh world and making the best of their lot.

Ironically largely as a result of increasingly constraining legislation, numerous third parties were significantly involved in the world of sex work. Besides the taxi drivers providing mobile brothel facilities already mentioned, there were many intermediaries and facilitators profiting from the trade, landlords, owners of pubs, cafes and nightclubs, quite apart from the most obvious and stigmatised third party, the ponce or pimp. Prostitution formed part of a wider economy of entertainment and recreation in the city.

This is an extremely important book with a lot to say about commercial sex, women's labour, urban life, policing, and some really rather depressing continuities in attitudes, policies and moral panics.

Lucy Delap, The Feminist Avant-Garde: Transatlantic Encounters of the Early Twentieth Century (2007)

2012-01-15T17:50:00.000Z

This is a very useful study of a neglected strand within and around feminism before World War I. It's particularly strong at looking at the controversial and short-lived yet influential journal The Freewoman and going beyond the perhaps overmuch rehearsed account of the debates on sexuality for which it provided a forum, important as those were - they were far from the whole story. It also points up the surprising (with the perspective of a century between) fuzziness of the suffrage/anti-suffrage distinction: a number of scholars have pointed out that anti-suffragists managed to combine a belief that women should not have the vote with a commitment to various causes within the public sphere and indeed aimed at the advancement of women (such as Mrs Humphrey Ward's work for women's higher education), but Delap also shows that a number of self-declared feminists, whether active in the suffrage movement, sympathetic, or disillusioned with the way the struggle was being taken, had attitudes towards other women which were far from sisterly and supportive.

It is valuable to have a nuanced account of how the movements in the UK and the USA influenced one another or produced local mutations of transatlantic developments, and also the influence of certain significant European figures. A whole book could perhaps be written about the place of Swedish feminist reformer Ellen Key's work in different national contexts.

Delap also looks at the extraordinarily heterogenous, not to mention counter-intuitive, sources upon which women were drawing to articulate their discontents with society, the position of women, etc and to advance solutions. The focus tends to be on the more individualistic, rather than collectivist, trend within feminism at the period, though in many cases the commitment to the development of the individual sat next to involvement in various forms of collective activism and programmes aimed at producing an impact on society as a whole.

This study reveals long-standing fracture lines between different feminisms, and also depicts certain phenomena which are perhaps reflected in other periods: for example, reading Delap's account of the turn to interiority, contemplation of the psyche, and the importance of the individual liberating herself from mind-forged manacles I was strongly reminded of directions taken following the renaissance of feminism as 'Women's Lib' in the late 1960s. During the 1970s there was a similar commitment to personal change, which took individuals down many different paths, including the teachings of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh.

Another exciting conference in Cambridge on the histories of reproductive matters

2012-01-12T20:46:00.000Z

Transforming Pregnancy Since 1900

29–30 March 2012
Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge

Around 1900, few pregnant women in Europe or North America had any contact with a medical practitioner before going into labour. By the second half of the twentieth century, the hospitalization of childbirth, the legalization of abortion and a host of biomedical technologies from the home pregnancy test and IVF to obstetric ultrasound and prenatal genetic diagnosis promised unprecedented control. New regulatory frameworks, changing relations between expectant mothers and medical practitioners and technologies for diagnosing, monitoring and intervening in pregnancy offer rich histories to explore. With scholarly writing predominantly dispersed among local studies of maternity care or focused on specific innovations, we lack a synthetic account of transformations in the management, experience and understanding of pregnancy across the whole twentieth century. This conference aims to break new ground by investigating the making, organization and communication of knowledge around pregnancy among experts and laypeople in Britain, France and the United States since 1900.
This interdisciplinary conference will bring together scholars with expertise in the history, sociology and anthropology of reproduction. Talks will be 10-minute summaries and commentaries of pre-circulated papers, followed by discussion in 50-minute slots in such a way as to promote dialogue and critical engagement between fields and approaches.

Salim Al-Gailani (University of Cambridge): Folic Acid: Making a Technology of Pre-Pregnancy
Caroline Arni (University of Basel): The Psychic Life of Pregnant Women: Early Twentieth-Century Prenatal Psychology
Tatjana Buklijas (Liggins Institute, New Zealand): Fetal Physiology, Nutrition Research and the Origins of the Barker Hypothesis
Angela Davis (University of Warwick): 'Heroes and Stoics': Women's Narratives of Maternity Care, c.1945–1990
Rose Elliot (University of Glasgow): Abortion, Miscarriage or Criminal Feticide? Medical Understandings of Early Pregnancy Loss in Britain, c.1900–1967
Ofra Koffman (King's College London): Temporary Crisis or Life-Long Disorder? Adolescence, Unwed Motherhood and Mental Pathology
Ilana Löwy (CNRS, Paris): Looking for Malformations, Looking for Risks: Fifty Years of Prenatal Diagnosis
Aryn Martin (York University, Canada): 'Something there is that doesn't love a wall': The Elusive Placental Barrier in Medical and Popular Health Discourse
Deborah Nicholson (University of the West of Scotland): 'Unseen Citizens': Ultrasonic Fetal Images and Narratives of Life Before Birth
Jesse Olszynko-Gryn (University of Cambridge): Diagnosing Pregnancy in the 1930s
Amanda Raphael (Independent Scholar): Deep Breaths and a Nice Cup of Tea: Antenatal Education Since the 1950s
Leslie Reagan (University of Illinois): Avoiding 'Monstrous' Babies Through Prenatal Care: Rubella, Girls, and Vaccination

The registration fee of £30 (£15 for students/unwaged) includes lunch and tea/coffee on both days. To register, please fill in the registration form and send it with a cheque for the registration fee (made payable to 'University of Cambridge') to:
Salim Al-Gailani
Transforming Pregnancy Conference
Department of History and Philosophy of Science
University of Cambridge
Free School Lane
Cambridge
CB2 3RH
Registration form
Organisers: Salim Al-Gailani (Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge), Angela Davis (Centre for the History of Medicine, University of Warwick) and Jesse Olszynko-Gryn (Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge).
Supported by a Wellcome Trust strategic award in the history of medicine to the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, and the Cambridge Interdisciplinary Reproduction Forum.
For further details, contact Salim Al-Gailani .

‘Women, Health and Welfare’ Women's History Network Southern Branch Spring Meeting

2012-01-09T21:04:00.000Z

Kingston University’s Centre for the Historical Record (CHR) will host the Spring 2012 one-day conference organised by the Women’s History Network, Southern Branch. The topic is deliberately broad to encourage a wide range of papers and participants interested in the history of women’s health and welfare. In resonance with the CHR’s remit to promote public history, the conference seeks to identify themes from history which resonate with women’s experiences of health and welfare today, and can inform policy makers. Proposals for papers are invited that relate to women either as receivers or providers of health and welfare, in any time period. We are particularly interested in papers which discuss these twin themes in women’s history in the context of public history, which may include a discussion of available archival sources and records. Conference themes might include those listed below, but we would be interested to receive papers on any theme which falls within the broad remit of the conference, as described above.
Women and Health

Physical health - different understandings of ‘illness’ and the medicalisation of women’s bodies
Mental health - changing ideas about treatment and perceptions of women’s relationship with their inner selves
Sexuality and medical discourse

Women and Welfare

The impact of welfare policy on women
The impact of women on welfare policy
Women as consumers of welfare

Public History

How can women’s history direct or inform modern media debates in matters relating to women’s health and welfare
How can women’s history help inform current policy on women’s health and welfare
How well is women’s health represented in archives; and discussions on accessibility to relevant records

Submissions
Please send a proposal of 250 words and a short biographical note to Sue Hawkins (s.e.hawkins@kingston.ac.uk1) or Nicola Phillips (n.phillips@kingston.ac.uk2). The deadline for the submission of proposals is 16 January 2012.

It is a pleasure to do this

2012-01-08T16:42:00.000Z

I shall be having a conversation with Julia Laite about her important new book, Common Prostitutes and Ordinary Citizens: Commerical Sex in London, 1885-1960 (Palgrave, 2011) at her book launch at Birkbeck College, University of London, on Friday 13th January.

If you are interested in attending or would like further details, please contact Julia.

I hope to be providing a review of the book here in due course. but I would already strongly recommend it as a study of a relatively neglected period in this topic.

Communicating Reproduction Conference: brief report

2011-12-14T21:42:00.000Z

I attended the Communicating Reproduction conference in Cambridge last week: a very good if also very intense and concentrated event. I liked the set-up - precirculated papers, hour-long sessions, speakers given 10 mins to present an overview of their paper, two discussants (at least one specialising in an entirely different period to the paper!) and then general discussion, which was very enthusiastic and animated.

The papers covered a very wide chronological range - from the middle ages to the C21st edition of the photographs of Lennart Nilsson's famous foetus photographs A Child Is Born - and different modes of communication, including the cinematic (there was a showing of the 1960s German sex education film Helga, though unfortunately a subtitled version had proved impossible to procure). It became clear that reproduction featured in numerous genres and indeed texts on reproduction not only mixed up genres (as was noted in the discussion after Helga) but could shift from genre to genre according to the particular context within which they were read and who was doing the reading, so that a text which might be appropriate and instructive in a single-sex group might be positively pornographic 'forbidden knowledge' in solitary reading by an individual of different gender.

Occasionally one would have liked more sense of how the topics of discussion were formed in a wider circulation of communication (I particularly wondered whether the 1970s 'home birth' movement had any interaction with the British natural childbirth movement that had emerged almost two decades previously, or with e.g. the Dutch system in which home-based, midwife-attended childbirth had never really gone away).

Participants also had an opportunity to see the Books and Babies exhibition in Cambridge University Library at a conference reception, at which conversation and discussion continued to be very lively, and continued over a conference dinner in the well-chosen Riceboat Keralan restaurant.

Archives of voluntary bodies

2011-11-28T14:36:00.001Z

It's gratifying to see that people are beginning to take seriously the problem of the archives of voluntary bodies of various kinds. There is a good blog post here on the Voluntary Action History Society blog, A New Campaign for Charity Archives and the British Records Association annual conference taking place tomorrow is Beyond the Fringe: the archives of pressure groups. These are the kind of organisations that may not even have a permanent HQ, so that their records get passed around as responsibilities change, and in addition they may be understandably devoting all their funds to the core activity for which they were founded.

Records of local organisations may find a home in the relevant local record office, and organisations which fall into specific areas may find that there is a specialist repository that may take them: in the Wellcome we hold a significant number of collections of Medical Charities and Pressure Groups as well as records of International Organisations. But there are still many organisations which do not fall into existing archival safety nets.

Cambridge Interdisciplinary Workshop on Reproduction

2011-11-21T20:59:00.000Z

I attended this workshop last Friday, a very full and exciting day covering a remarkable range of historical periods and disciplinary approaches, from medieval fertility charms to the impact of contemporary surrogacy on families. Besides giving me information I did not know (I was not aware that there was a noticeable decrease in infant mortality in the C18th - although it then stuck at that plateau pretty much until the C20th) it provided new perspectives on various matters I thought I did know something about.

Perhaps particularly relevant to my own interests, I was intrigued by Anne Hanley's paper on the differing views of French and English physicians in the late C19th about how long a young man should defer marriage if he was discovered to have syphilis, by the attitudes to unwanted extramarital pregnancy and the prospect of abortion in UK 'Kitchen-Sink' literature and film of the 50s and 60s delineated by Fran Bigman, and the possibility mooted by Jesse Olszynko-Gryn that pills meant to act as a pregnancy test in the 1960s were being deployed as abortifacients. I also liked the suggestion that seemed to underlie the evidence put forward by Sarah Jennings from research on children and young adults with lesbian and gay parents, and Susan Imrie on the impact of surrogacy on the children of surrogate mothers, that perhaps children tend to take their family as the norm and consider it ordinary; even perhaps when aware that it is perceived as different by those around them.

A most stimulating day, productive of thoughts I am still mulling over.

More from the Wellcome blog

2011-11-10T15:38:00.000Z

Re the recently catalogued archive of the International Confederation of Midwives - lots of good stuff in there.

And a couple of my own posts going back a couple of weeks: for the release of the catalogue of Charles Rycroft's papers and a brief memorial to Madeleine Simms

Braaaains

2011-11-07T12:07:00.000Z

Well, apparently they're broadcasting a programme on Radio 4 on lobotomy that I recorded an interview for some while ago (since we have a pair of Watts-Freeman Lobotomy Tools, with catalogue, among the William Sargant papers in the archives, and these are apparently quite rare items).

Not only did I only just find out about this by indirect means, I discover that they are using a photo of me in Ms Frankenstein mode brandishing one of the tools for their website announcement.

Exciting news from the Wellcome blog

2011-11-05T12:45:00.000Z

While I have previously expressed my views that almost certainly too much attention has been paid to the eugenic discourse in the early C20th and seldom enough to other less clearly focused and visible movements based on a more environmentalist/improvability of the human product philosophy, I'm still very excited indeed about this project at the Wellcome:
Papers of the Eugenics Society to be Digitised
This is an extremely significant collection which has a lot to offer beyond the mere story of eugenics in the UK. True, it's had a lot of use over the decades since it was acquired and catalogued by what was then the Contemporary Medical Archives Centre at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, but there are still quite a lot of areas that have not been explored as fully as they might be. For an indication of some of the work that's already been done, see the Birth Control/Eugenics bibliography: secondary works (pdf)on the Wellcome Library website.

Some intriguing exhibitions at UCL

2011-10-27T20:13:00.000+01:00

The Body in Pieces: Fragments from the Great Ormond Street Hospital Collection

An Enquiring Mind: Francis Galton 1822-1911 (a creepy polymath, but interesting)

Word and image: Early modern treasures from the UCL Collections

The Slave-owners of Bloomsbury

I really must try and get to this, given that they're just round the corner and could be done in a lunch-hour!

Another exciting workshop on reproduction in Cambridge

2011-10-17T19:42:00.000+01:00

I do find it somewhat amusing that this plethora of fascinating events on reproduction-related matters is taking place at the academic institution from which William Empson was dismissed for the possession of contraceptives in 1929.

Interdisciplinary Workshop on Reproduction 7

Friday, 18 November 2011
09:00 - 18:00
Location: CRASSH, 17 Mill Lane, Cambridge

9.00 -9.20	Registration
9.20 -9.30	Welcome and Introductions
9.30 - 10.00	Session 1 Chair: Susan Golombok (CFR) Karin Ekholm (HPS) "Why we begin with the hen's egg": investigations of animal generation, 1600-1650
10.00 - 10.30	Peter Jones (King's College) and Lea Olsan (University of Louisiana at Monroe) Charms and amulets for conception and childbirth
10.30 - 11.00	Sarah Jennings (CFR) Children's voices: the perspectives of children and young adults with lesbian and gay parents
11.00 - 11.30	Tea/Coffee Break

11.30 - 12.00	Session 2 Chair: Richard Smith (Geography) Romola Davenport (Geography) Reproduction in the city: the revolution in infant survival in eighteenth century London
12.00 - 12.30	Anne R Hanley (History) Venereal conundrums: medical and social knowledge of venereal disease in late-Victorian and Edwardian England
12.30 - 13.00	Salim Al-Gailani (HPS) Maternal nutrition and the medicalization of pregnancy in late twentieth-century Britain
13.00 - 14.00	Lunch Break
14.00 - 14.30	Session 3 Chair: John Forrester (HPS) Fran Bigman (English) The shattered mould: abortion and class in 1930s rhetoric and fiction
14.30 - 15.00	Jesse Olszynko-Gryn (HPS) Pregnancy test pills as camouflaged abortifacients in the 1960s
15.00 - 15.30	Tea/Coffee Break
15.30 - 16.00	Session 4 Chair: Nick Hopwood (HPS) Ramona Braun (HPS) Endoscopic alternatives for female fertilisation and sterilisation in the 1960s

16.00 - 16.30	Susan Imrie (CFR) An investigation into the impact of surrogacy on the children of surrogate mothers
16.30	Closing remarks

Eleanor Gordon and Gwyneth Nair, Public Lives: Women, Family and Society in Victorian Britain (2003)

2011-10-08T22:35:00.000+01:00

Apart from a slight cavil over the title, which is presumably publisher business rather than the authors's choice - the book is rather specifically about middle class families in Victorian Glasgow - I thought this was an amazing and very useful book. I sometimes think it can never be reiterated too much that that whole public/private boundary was fairly permeable, what with the home/domestic space being a site for sociability, for a significant number of occupations where the male head of the family did all or some of his work, etc, etc, and women being in public in a whole range of capacities from the pursuit of pleasure to the practice of philanthropy, and by the end of the period, the campaign for political rights.

Makes one wonder whether too often 'public' life has been taken to mean involvement in formal political activity on a national or local level and engagement in a remunerative profession.

Though Gordon and Nair show not only that women were heading a significant number of households, they were not infrequently managing their own money (if they were single, widowed, or had money settled on them when married) and even pursuing a range of occupations beyond that of governess. It's also clear that in the class being described, women were often partners in their husbands' endeavours, even if few went as far as Agnes Lister in being Joseph Lister's experimental subject in calculating the dosage for chloroform.

A wonderful range of sources was consulted to make up this book, from public records such as census returns and property taxes, and wills and testamentary dispositions, to private family papers.

One question that does rise is the extent to which the life-styles they describe were inflected by particular characteristics of Scots law, religion and social practice, or even the specific civil culture of Glasgow. However, they do make a powerful case for not accepting the rhetoric and ideology of 'separate spheres' and simplistic interpretation of the public and the private when thinking about gender roles in Victorian Britain (and indeed other times and places)

A few blocks down the Euston Road

2011-10-06T18:23:00.000+01:00

I was reminded about this by a post on the Women's History Network Discussion List. I was involved in the early discussions about this gallery, but I missed the formal opening in June because I was attending the Berks, so it rather slipped off my radar.

Thanks to ‘EGA for Women’, a group that campaigned to preserve the core of the former Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital, and to the generosity of UNISON, The Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Gallery is now open to the public. It is a permanent installation in the beautifully restored 1890s hospital building, part of the new UNISON Centre. Using a variety of media, the gallery tells the story of Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, her hospital, and women’s struggle to achieve equality in the field of medicine, set within the wider framework of 19^th and 20^th century social history.

The Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Gallery
The UNISON Centre
130 Euston Road
London NW1 2AY
Telephone: 0845 355 084

The gallery is very close to the Wellcome Collection, the British Library – and Euston and King’s Cross stations. Numerous bus routes pass the door.

Admission is free and the gallery is open Wednesday to Friday 9.00am to 6.00pm and on the first Saturday of every month 9.00am to 6.00pm. An audio descriptive guide for the blind and partially sighted is available at the Reception Desk.

Another interesting exhibition

2011-09-28T15:12:00.000+01:00

THE FOETUS GOES PUBLIC

Images of the Unborn from the Middle Ages to the Twenty-First Century

An exhibition of the history of the public images of embryos and foetuses will take place in the Holliday Building at Durham University’s Queen’s Campus in Stockton-on-Tees from Friday 7^th October until Friday 9^th December.

‘The Foetus Goes Public’ looks at how images of embryos and foetuses shape our understanding of life and reproduction. This exhibition tells the fascinating story of how the foetus moved from obscure Medieval manuscripts to become a public icon in the twentieth century that, today, is available to everyone at anytime through the internet.

Dr Lutz Sauerteig from the Centre for the History of Medicine and Disease will officially open the exhibition on 7^th October at 1.30 pm.

The exhibition is accompanied by a series of public lectures :

Prof John McLachlan (School of Medicine and Health), ‘Imagining the Embryo’ (21 October, 12.45pm, Holliday Building, Room A011).

Dr Nadja Reissland (Department of Psychology), ‘Fetal Crying: Is the Fetal Cry Face Gestalt Associated with Prenatal Depression and Attachment?’ (11 November, 10.00 am, Wolfson Research Institute, Room F009).

Dr Sebastian Pranghofer (CHMD and Department of Philosophy), ‘Personhood Before Birth? Early Modern Images of the Unborn’ (25 November, 12.45pm, Holliday Building, Room A015/016).

Entry to the exhibition and the lectures is free.

For more information, contact Rachel Simpson on telephone 0191 3340700, email: rachel.simpson@durham.ac.uk or visit http://www.dur.ac.uk/chmd/.

Some forthcoming events

2011-09-26T20:30:00.000+01:00

Pathology Museum Seminars at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital

A unique series of seminars that promise both fascinating insights into a diverse range of topics,

and also a glimpse into a little known London museum. Housed within the grounds of St. Bartholomew’s 
Hospital at West Smithfield, the museum holds a broad range of pathological 
specimens, some of  which date from the late 1700s, and the papers programmed all speak in 
some way to this collection, as well as to each other.

October 12th 5.30-7.00 
Documentary filmmaker and producer Phil Stein will show excerpts from and 
speak on the Making of the Elephant Man (2010)

October 19th 6.00-7.30
Professor Tili Tansey (Queen Mary) and Professor Brian Hurwitz (King College 
London) speaking on medical narratives and museum voices

November 9th 5.30-7.00
Philip Ball (University of Cambridge) and a medical artist will speak on the 
history of medical illustration and their current practice 

November 16th 5.30-7.00 
Dr Keir Waddington (Cardiff University) will speak on ‘Dying Scientifically: 
Gothic Romances and London’s Teaching Hospitals’. Dr Sam 
Alberti (The Royal College of Surgeon) and Dr Fay Bound Alberti (Queen Mary) 
will present on ‘Body Parts on Bart’s’

November 23rd 5.30-7.00
Dr Carmen Mangion and Dr Louise Hide from the Birkbeck Pain Project will 
speak on 'Rhetorics of Pain in Nineteenth-Century Convent Necrologies' be 
speaking on 'Pain and Neurosyphilis'

November 30th 5.30-7.00 
Professor Sharon Ruston (University of Salford) will speak on ‘Shelly and Davy 
and the Bart’s Medical Archive’ and Professor Iwan Rhys Morus (University of 
Aberystwyth) will present on ‘Frankenstein and Vitality’

December 14th 5.30-7.00
David Ross (The Army Health Unit, Camberley) will present on public health 
and the military and Professor Edgar Jones (Kings College London) will speak 
on shellshock and its representation in film

No need to book, wine and nibbles provided

Robin Brook Centre at St.  Barts, West Smithfield, EC1M 6BQ. Closest tube stops is St. Paul's.

Malicious Damage: The crimes of Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell

In 1962 the aspiring playwright Joe Orton and his partner and mentor 
Kenneth Halliwell, who live together in Islington, were each sentenced 
to six months imprisonment for malicious damage to Islington Public 
Library books. The offenders were found guilty of stealing and 
‘doctoring’ library book covers with images from other sources or by 
adding new text and narrative. They also removed illustrations from 
library art books to ‘wallpaper’ their bed-sit at 25 Noel Road. During imprisonment Joe Orton embarked 
upon what was to be a successful but all too brief writing career, cut 
short by his murder at the jealous hand of his partner. ‘Malicious 
Damage’ tells the story surrounding the crimes of Orton and Halliwell 
and, for the first time at Islington Museum, offers the opportunity to 
view all of the surviving doctored book covers along with other material
 reflecting the life and work of the pair. ‘Malicious Damage’ coincides 
with the publication of a new book of the same title, produced by 
Islington Library and Heritage Services and Donlon Books. 
 
 Free event at Islington Museum
 
 For more information, please call 020 7527 2837
 or email islington.museum@islington.gov.uk

Forthcoming radio appearance

2011-09-15T16:43:00.000+01:00

I was interviewed a few weeks ago for this BBC Radio 3 programme forthcoming on Sunday evening: Out in the World - A Global Gay History (Episode 1). A trailer for it featured on today's Woman's Hour.

Women's History Network Conference 2011

2011-09-12T16:28:00.000+01:00

This was an excellent conference and all credit to the organisers. Gratifying to report for a conference celebrating 20 years of the WHN annual conference, along with many of the old guard still going strong (indeed if memory serves I was at the 1991 conference in Nottingham) there were large numbers of newer and younger faces, which in view of the suggested decline in women's studies and women's history was an encouraging sign.

One general observation: this year panel presenters seem to have given more attention to the question, 'Is that PowerPoint really necessary?' - while there are many instances in which PowerPoint is indeed a boon (anyone who recollects the hassles involving slides, projectors, overhead transparencies etc realises that it does serve a purpose), last year I felt there was a certain amount of belief that every paper must have its PowerPoint, whether or not there was valuable visual evidence to be conveyed.

All the panels and papers I attended had something of interest about them. The panel I chaired on Sunday worked particularly well - although a couple of the papers were familiar to me from the Berks (Tim Jones on D Sherwin Bailey's theology of marriage and Jacqueline de Vries on Mary Scharlieb and sex education in the early 20th) with Sue Morgan's work on Maude Royden and Sex and Commonsense as well the conjunction went very well indeed and (like other papers I heard) reinforces the importance of taking another look at the role of religion and spirituality in the development of modern sexual discourses in the C19th and C20th.

The ancillary events were also splendid - the conference dinner at Toynbee Hall (and the catering generally), the evening reception for book launches and award presentation in The Women's Library exhibition space.

Conference-ing

2011-09-09T11:02:00.000+01:00

Getting my head up from of the arduous and engrossing task of revising Sex, Gender and Social Change (holy cow, but there has been A LOT of relevant historiography happening since 1999) to make my more or less habitual trip to the Women's History Network Annual Conference (this year I'm even able to attend on all 3 days).

Not sure whether I shall be able to make the time to do a conference report, but the programme and abstracts are available here.

On behalf of a colleague who's organising this

2011-09-05T13:45:00.001+01:00

Healthcare and housewifery
Wellcome Collection talk
06 October 2011, 19.00 - 20.30
How did edible remedies enable women to challenge male medical orthodoxy in early modern England?
While some people turned to medical practitioners in times of illness, many relied on homemade medicines and remedies.
This event includes time for you to view unique manuscripts from the Wellcome Library’s special collections.
Speaker: Dr Elaine Leong , historian of early modern medicine and science, University of Cambridge.
This event is FREE.
To book a ticket please click here.
This talk forms part of a wider series of autumn events at Wellcome Collection exploring the connections between food, health and life. To find out more please go to http://www.wellcomecollection.org/whats-on/events/recipes-and-remedies.aspx.

Women Health and Healing reprised

2011-09-01T20:00:00.000+01:00

I will be presenting a Wellcome Library Insights session on Women Health and Healing at 3 pm on 22nd September. Illustrated talk and a chance to get up close and personal with some archival and manuscript materials.

Forthcoming conference

2011-08-22T16:22:00.000+01:00

Women's History Network Annual Conference
Friday 9th to Sunday 11th September 2011
20 Years of the Women's History Network
Looking Back - Looking Forward
At The Women's Library, London Metropolitan University.

I shall be giving a paper in the 'Sexualities' panel, 9.30-11 am on the Saturday.

Exciting new project with which I am involved

2011-08-17T19:48:00.000+01:00

There's not much on it yet, but Interdisciplinary Readings: Havelock Ellis & Co now has a blog, and I look forward to seeing how this proceeds.

Feelthy pictures?

2011-08-15T20:18:00.000+01:00

Not very, really, but official sensibilities seem to have been very touchy in the 1950s (and maybe it's less the pictures than the words, and the conjunctions of the two):
The Director of Public Prosecutions' campaign against obscene seaside postcards
the cards in question, online at the British Cartoon Archive.

Catching up on journal articles and chapters XIV

2011-08-14T17:00:00.001+01:00

Adrian Bingham, 'The British Popular Press And Venereal Disease During The Second World War', Historical Journal, 2005, 48, 1055‑76: very useful on the extent to which the Daily Mirror actually broke through the general taboo in the popular press which watered down the Ministry of Health public awareness campaign on VD in WWII and the wider context for this.

Joanna de Groot, '"Sex" and "race": the construction of language and image in the nineteenth century", in Catherine Hall (ed.), Cultures of Empire: A Reader: Colonizers in Britain and the Empire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 37‑60, great stuff on the pervasiveness of Orientalist tropes around gender and sexuality in the C19th; and in the same volume ; Sonya O. Rose, 'Sex, citizenship and the nation in World War II Britain', 148-79 about attitudes to women, fear of their enjoying themselves in time of war, and the massive panics about their relationships with American troops, esp, of course, Black GIs.

Eleanor Gordon and Gwyneth Nair, ' Middle-Class Family Structure in Nineteenth-Century Glasgow' Journal of Family History, 1999 24: 468 - indicates that there were a lot more female-headed (middle-class) households than the patriarchal family paradigm would have us think, and not all widows or unmarried women were living under the roof of some male relative.

Emma L. Jones, 'Attitudes to Abortion in the Era of Reform: evidence from the Abortion Law Reform Association correspondence', Women's History Review, 2011, 20:2, 283‑98 - how attitudes were changing in the early 60s - changes in language used and sense of this being a question one can ask, about access to proper medical facilities.

Jane Pilcher, ' Sex in Health Education: Official Guidance for Schools in England, 1928–1977' Journal of Historical Sociology Vol. 17 No. 2/3 June/September 2004, 185‑208 - that up until 1943 there was no official guidance, and the absence of anything about the reproductive system in the BoE guidelines on health ed had a negative influence. In the 1950s (after the 1943 sex ed guidelines go out of print) a chapter is incorporated into the health ed guidelines but it's very much as one would expect about control and health and even a continuing eugenic agenda rather than anything about pleasure well into the 70s

Tanya Evans, 'The Other Woman and her Child: extra-marital affairs and illegitimacy in twentieth-century Britain', Women's History Review 'Lone Mothers' issue, 2011, 20, 67-86: the hidden prevalence of unmarried couples (because of inability of one partner to divorce etc) and of illeg offspring absorbed into the mother's family - instances where these things didn't come to the attention of authorites (really until those surveys of the post WWII era?) and people were pretty determined to conceal that all was not as it should be (presumption of marriage, etc)

More from that productive team of Gayle Davis and Roger Davidson, ‘Big White Chief’,‘Pontius Pilate’,and the ‘Plumber’: The Impact of the 1967 Abortion Act on the Scottish Medical Community, c.1967–1980' , 2003, Vol.18 pp.283–306: how the Scottish medical (and nursing) professions reacted to the demand for abortion once it was legal, the massive regional variations, the attempts to negotiate decision-making in a charged area, the temporary use of psychiatrists (which changed as things became more routine), the influence of specific individuals, for or against, in particular areas (also, different local cultures) - Aberdeen vs Glasgow. Suspect that quite a lot of this would have been much the same in England and Wales?

Recent books

2011-08-13T22:31:00.000+01:00

Since I've started actually working on the revisions I've had less time and mental energy to do these posts and have fallen sadly behind in updating. So, a quick round-up of books, and I may get round to a probably rather abbreviate roundup of articles and chapters in the next day or so.

John Tosh, A Man's Place: Masculinity and the Middle-class Home in Victorian England (Yale UP, 1999 - amazon says Mar 1999 but I don't think it was out when I was working on first edition of Sex,Gender and Social Change). This was re-read - or rather, I think I read at least parts in ms, not sure I ever read the whole thing straight through after publication - and is really useful on Victorian middle-class masculinity and the domestic and the centrality of marriage to adult manhood, and the way things shifted over the century.

Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Context (Routledge 1995), which I should have read before and didn't. It is really excellent, and has (what somehow I had not got an impression of) a real appreciation of the complexities and the ways in which phenomena were situated. I am usually a bit dubious about people using the Munby/Cullwick relationship (it's one of those things that keeps getting revisited, and with my archivist's hat on, can't help thinking that that is because there is already a huge beaten track to their papers), but I was really excited by how McClintock used it as the basis for thick description of the wider context.

Pamela Cox, Gender, Justice and Welfare in Britain,1900-1950: Bad Girls in Britain, 1900-1950 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). I had to skim over some sections of this because I had it on InterLibrary Loan for a very short period, but it's brilliant stuff on 'delinquent girls' and the ways girls who were seen as 'wayward' and in need of control and who were seen as 'vulnerable' and in need of care got sucked into a twilight zone of public/private provisions. And that whatever the girls were actually doing, the basic problem was seen as being about sex.

Stephen Cretney, Family Law in the Twentieth Century; A History (OUP, 2003), This is wonderful. Okay, I don't think I, or anybody, would want to sit down and read the whole thing straight through, it's a big fat book in which on most pages the footnotes take up more than half the space, but it just so clearly lays out the law and how it got to be that way and how the changes happened and what the unintended consequences were. It even told me something I hadn't known about the 1857 Divorce Law (a by-product of the desire to have a less labyrinthine probate system than was the case under the various ecclesiastical jurisdictions).

Communicating Reproduction Conference

2011-08-11T09:46:00.000+01:00

Another event from the Generation to Reproduction research Group at Cambridge. I greatly enjoyed their Reproduction and the Sciences conference last April

Communicating Reproduction

A conference to be held in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge, on 5–6 December 2011

Scholars have explored continuities and discontinuities in theories of sex and gender; knowledge of entities such as seeds, germs, embryos, monsters and clones; concerns about creation, evolution, degeneration and regeneration; investments in maternity, paternity and heredity; practices of fertility control, potency and childbirth; and health relations between citizen and state, individual and population. But we have paid much less attention to the huge changes in processes and media of communication. There is important work on specific practices, from education to advertising, conversation to mass entertainment, and on specific media, from ritual objects to printed books, films to the internet. But we lack synthetic and comparative accounts. This conference aims to explore how we might best ground debates about reproduction in changing practices of communication over the long term, though primarily within the Western tradition. Nor is reproduction just a lens through which to view the history of communication. For generation and reproduction are themselves potent metaphors for communication. Richard de Bury wrote in Philobiblon (1345) of the making of books as a form of generation across time and modern authors often frame the distribution of identical copies in terms of mechanical reproduction.
The conference will bring together scholars representing ancient to modern periods and various disciplines. Talks will be 20-minute summaries of pre-circulated papers, followed by commentary and discussion in one-hour slots in such a way as to promote dialogue and critical engagement between fields and approaches.
Speakers and provisional titles:

Helen King (Open University)
Educating Lucina: midwives and the communication of reproductive knowledge, ancient and early modern
Montserrat Cabré (Universidad de Cantabria, Spain)
Iberian recipes and the appropriation of knowledge in relation to human reproduction
Catherine Rider (University of Exeter)
Communicating religious views of infertility in the Middle Ages
Jennifer Richards (Newcastle University)
'Issue dangerous to the Queen': pregnancy and politics in the Elizabethan polity
Mary Fissell (The Johns Hopkins University)
Making a masterpiece from bits and pieces
Angelique Richardson (University of Exeter)
Reproduction and the post-Darwinian novel
Staffan Müller-Wille (University of Exeter)
Reproducing species
Wendy Kline (University of Cincinnati)
Coming home: modern midwifery and the controversy over home birth
Solveig Jülich (Stockholm University)
The Lennart Nilsson-industry: remediating images of life before birth
Uta Schwarz (Cologne)
Introduction to the film Helga (1967)
Ludmilla Jordanova (King's College, London)
Closing comments

Organisers: Nick Hopwood, Peter Jones, Lauren Kassell, Francis Neary, Jim Secord
Funding: Wellcome Trust strategic award in the history of medicine on Generation to Reproduction
The registration fee of £40 (£20 for students/unwaged) includes lunch and tea/coffee on both days, a reception in the Books & Babies exhibition at the University Library and the film screening.
To register, please fill in the registration form and send it with a cheque for the registration fee (made payable to 'University of Cambridge') to:
Francis Neary
Communicating Reproduction Conference
Department of History and Philosophy of Science
University of Cambridge
Free School Lane
Cambridge
CB2 3RH

Population Investigation Committee Symposium Podcast

2011-08-06T11:01:00.000+01:00

Back in February I participated in this symposium on the Population Investigation Committee. Podcasts of the contributions are now available, though I'm not sure how much sense mine will make without the accompanying copious pictures from other collections in the Wellcome Library that I was talking about.

Forthcoming Sexual Cultures conference

2011-08-05T09:27:00.000+01:00

SEXUAL CULTURES: THEORY, PRACTICE, RESEARCH

This conference, co-hosted by the Onscenity Research Network and the Schools of Arts and Social Sciences at Brunel University, will take place on April 20-22 2012 at Brunel University, London, UK.

http://www.onscenity.org/conf1/

Our keynote speakers are:

Martin Barker, Professor of Film and Television Studies, Aberystwyth University, UK

Violet Blue, blogger, columnist, sex educator, and author, US

Judith Halberstam, Professor of English, American Studies and Ethnicity and Gender Studies, University of Southern California, US

Katrien Jacobs, Associate Professor at Chinese University of Hong Kong

Fiona Patten, Australian Sex Party

The key themes of the conference are:

Sex and technology

Technologies of all kinds have been central to the ways in which sex is understood and experienced in contemporary societies. We are interested in papers that explore evolving technologies in the presentation of sex through print, photography, film and video to todays online and mobile media; the ways that technologies are increasingly integrated into everyday sex lives; the expansion of sex technologies in toy, doll, machine and robot manufacture, the marketing of drugs such as Viagra and cosmetic technologies such as body modification and genital surgery for enhancing sex; the expansion of sex work and recreation online; sex 2.0 practices, regimes and environments such as porn tubes, sex chat rooms and worlds like Second Life; and the shifting relations between bodies and machines in the present and in predictions of futuresex.

The regulation of sex

Papers in this strand of the conference will examine how sexuality and the ways in which it is represented are the focus of government policy and subject to various forms of regulation. In democratic societies, sexuality is generally thought to be the domain of the private and personal, outside the ambit of the law whose function in this sphere is simply to maintain public decency. Yet vast amounts of institutional effort and resources are invested in what has come to be called moral regulation, in which self-governance and moral discourse are generally preferred to coercive forms of regulation. At the same time, governments continue to make certain forms of sexual practice and representation illegal. What are the limits of the legally possible today, both in terms of sexual behaviour and representation, and what are the various means employed to encourage us to behave properly in the sexual domain?

Working sex

In recent years sex work has become a potent site for the discussion of labour, commerce and sexual ethics, attracting increased academic attention and public concern. Papers in this strand of the conference will seek to develop our understanding of commercial sex, focus on conceptualizing emerging types of sexual labour, and explore the place of sex work of all kinds in contemporary society. They will ask how an investigation of contemporary forms of sex work and sex as work may shed new light on the study of cultural production, industry, commerce, and notions of commodification and labour. We are also seeking papers which are interested in exploring the connections between work and leisure, work and pleasure, sex work as forms of body and affective labour, and the ethics and politics of sexual labour.

Researching everyday sex

Research into sexuality can often be caught in a politics of anxiety where it is constructed as something that needs to be managed, protected and even guarded against. Sexuality is also understood as absolutely intrinsic to our sense of identity, an important indicator of mental and emotional health and a form of intimate communication and individual fulfillment, as well as an important site of pleasure and play. Papers in this strand of the conference will take as their focus the diverse sexual identities, practices, representations, values and experiences that make up the mundane and spectacular elements of everyday sexual life. We seek papers that examine the politics and/or ethics of researching everyday sexualities, as well as the lived realities of sex in the quotidian.

We invite proposals for the following:

Panels and roundtable discussions of up to four speakers

Papers (20 minutes)

Short Ignite papers (5 minutes/20 slides)

Posters

Deadline for the submission of proposals is October 31 2011.

For all individual papers please submit a 150 word abstract and 150 word biographical note.

Please indicate which key theme of the conference your paper belongs to.

For panels and roundtable sessions please submit a 600-800 overview and set of abstracts with 150 word biographical notes.

Please indicate which key theme of the conference your paper belongs to.

Please submit your proposals to conference@onscenity.org

Onscenity is funded by the UK Arts & Humanities Research Council and draws together international experts in order to respond to the new visibility or onscenity of sex in commerce, culture and everyday life. The network is committed to working towards developing new approaches to the relationships between sex, commerce, media and technology. Drawing on the work of leading scholars from around the world, it aims to map a transformed landscape of sexual practices and co-ordinate a new wave of research.

Exhibition of interest in Cambridge

2011-08-04T19:28:00.000+01:00

Organised by the group whose conference I attended and enjoyed back in April:

Books & Babies: Communicating Reproduction

7 July–23 December 2011
(Closed 29 August and 12–18 September inclusive)
Monday-Friday 09.00-18.00, Saturday 09.00-16.30, Sunday closed
Admission Free

The London underground displays posters for fertility clinics, directed
at both women and men. Picture books teach children the facts of life.
We are always reading about reproduction. Reproduction also describes
what communication media do — multiply images, sounds and text for wider
consumption. This exhibition is about these two senses of reproduction,
about babies and books, and the ways in which they have interacted in
the past and continue to interact today.

Before reproduction there was generation, a broader view of how all
things come into being than the fusion of egg and sperm. Before
electronic media there were clay figurines, papyrus, parchment, printed
books and journals. The interactions between communication media and
ideas about reproduction have transformed the most intimate aspects of
our lives.

/Books and Babies/ traces these interactions from ancient fertility
figures and medieval manuscripts to the birth of Louise Brown following
in vitro fertilization in 1978. The media sensation that surrounded her
arrival illustrates how modern reproductive ‘miracles’ have been
publicised worldwide. The research with Patrick Steptoe and Jean Purdy
that led Robert Edwards to win the Nobel Prize reveals the varied roles
of communication within and around the laboratory.

The exhibition opens with a chronological story of the books and other
objects that have been central to communicating reproduction from
ancient times to the present day. We move from theories of human
generation to the modern dilemmas of reproductive choice and population
control, and from handwritten documents to digital media. Other elements
pursue particular themes: communication in reproductive research, the
long life of a single advice manual (/Aristotle’s Masterpiece/), the
evolutionary epic of the ‘Ascent of Man’, ‘Extraordinary Births’ as
news, and the rise of ‘Population Arithmetick’. 
Funded by a Wellcome Trust Strategic Award in the History of Medicine on
'Generation to Reproduction'

Jane Lewis, The End of Marriage: Individualism and Intimate Relations (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2001)

2011-08-03T20:57:00.000+01:00

Useful study of marriage (mostly in the UK) at the turn of the millennium, though I do rather wish it had come out just a little later and included the advent of civil partnership and how that is involved in marriage paradigms. Contests the notion that we are now in an age of selfish individualism and career-driven women, suggesting that connections and relationships remain important, and that broad brush characterisations overlook enormous amounts of complexity (e.g. women who do have a commitment to a career, and women who are economically obliged to work but don't make it their first priority).

However, marriage rates are falling, people are marrying at a later age and not necessarily having children: ' In one generation, the numbers marrying have halved, the numbers divorcing have trebled and the proportion of children born outside marriage has quadrupled.' But, (as in earlier periods) a significant number of those children born outside wedlock are actually being parented within stable cohabiting relationships.

Very helpful general background of statistics, legal changes, changing attitudes etc framing a small qualitative study of stable married and cohabiting couples with children and why they chose that. Marriage usually the outcome of a cohabiting relationship - time to get married, often associated with desire to begin a family, but couples who do not marry and have children tend to wait until the relationship has reached a certain point of stability. Moving in together and investing in property as a sign of commitment. Extent to which couples' families come to accept them as as good as married. A certain amount of generational shift from outside validation of relationships to an inward individual commitment. What people think is important in relationships and how they balance up perceptions about e.g. unpaid labour within them. Negotation and communication rather than wife 'getting round' husband.

While cohabitees would like some recognition of their status, there's also a resistance to creating actual explicit contracts between the couple.

The ever-persisting class/poverty dimension - single mothers are likely to be poorer, if they cohabit it is often more of a drift than a specific choice, context of lives already somewhat chaotic, but there may be rational choice element in the context of what options are available to them.

Lots of useful points. Though in the light of several articles I've been reading about earlier periods and the ways in which people's lives did not match up to hegemonic contemporary paradigms of marriage , how far is this just certain relationship patterns becoming more visible, and perhaps more openly accepted (rather than the convention of e.g. women changing their names to the man's if they couldn't marry).

Catching up on journal literature and chapters XIII

2011-07-30T17:31:00.000+01:00

More from Lucy Delap, Ben Griffin, Abigail Wills, The Politics of Domestic Authority in Britain since 1800 (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009),

Megan Doolittle, 'Fatherhood and Family Shame: Masculinity, Welfare and the Workhouse in late Nineteenth-Century England' pp 84-108, which is really useful on the instability of working-class male identity and authority within the family, possibly increasing with developing state/voluntary interventions in late C19th. The humiliation of the rituals around entering the workhouse - in fact this was fairly small % of population but may have been effectively deterrent? (wonder if vaccination resistance fits in here)

Deborah Thom, '"Beating children is wrong": Domestic Life, Psychological Thinking and the Permissive Turn' pp 261-283 - mentions that Susan Isaacs and Mary Chadwick refer to potential dangerous sexual arousal of spanking as punishment.

Lesley Hoggart, 'The campaign for birth control in Britain in the 1920s', in Anne Digby and John Stewart, Gender, Health and Welfare (1996), which is largely about the Workers' Birth Control Group and about which I was just a shade iffy - yes, there was a maternalist and socialist slant to their work and it wasn't a feminist campaign by the standards of late C20th ideas of feminist politics of reproduction perhaps, but my own feeling is that there was a certain amount of finding strategic rhetorics, e.g. maternal health, by which to promote b-c (though I think this might also read interestingly side by side with the Brooke article about Dora Russell and the modern female body). I certainly wouldn't concur that the 1930 Ministry of Health circular was what the WBCG wanted, because its provisions were so minimal and restrictive. However, it was an important symbolic victory.

Laura Tabili, '"Women of a Very Low Type": Crossing Racial Boundaries in Imperial Britain', in Laura Frader and Sonya Rose (eds), Gender and Class in Modern Europe (1996, pp. 165-190: a classic and important article about perceptions of the 'Black' (actually extremely diverse groups of Africans, Asians, etc) communities in early C20th Britain and the stigmatisation women who associated with them. They were mostly concentrated around ports and docklands - which brings in a whole lot of existing class and gender prejudices associated with those areas. Notes the invisiblity of Black/mixed race women in the debates which are all about 'Black' men and 'White' women. Indicates that prejudices were not monolithic, and within the actual communities these families were accepted.

Pamela Dale and Kate Fisher. 'Contrasting Municipal Responses to the Provision of Birth Control Services in Halifax and Exeter before 1948', Social History of Medicine, 23, 2010, pp 567-585. More on the important local dimension of the introduction of birth control services and the interests who were behind the clinic - in Exeter it was much more officially sponsored and also had significant support from local philanthropic (eugenically-inclined) ladies, but was not as much of a success as it might have been at pulling in the punters. In Halifax the clinic was very much out of the loop of power and influence and networks but was arguably more successful with its client base, to which it was very responsive (i.e. quite flexible and open to people's needs rather than imposing a model).

This is probably not entirely connected to this, but I have been wondering (thinking about the extent to which the work on clinics, and the oral history work, indicates relative lack of take-up of the cap) about the other female methods like sponges and soluble pessaries which don't seem to be in this debate at all - it's either male methods like withdrawal or condoms, or it's the complicated and disliked cap.

Roger Davidson & Gayle Davis, 'Sexuality and the State: the Campaign for Scottish Homosexual Law Reform, 1967–80' , Contemporary British History, 2006 20:4, 533-558 - asks whether the final outcome of the campaign was anything more than a rather weak symbolic victory in the face of continuing Scottish homophobia and continuing refusal to consider that it was a problem - i.e. takes the story on from their Wolfenden article

Katherine Holden, 'Imaginary Widows: Spinsters, Marriage, and the ''Lost Generation'' in Britain after the Great War', Journal of Family History 2005 30: 388. Really good piece on the specific way that unmarried women were perceived after the Great War and the way that there was a perception (correct or not) that it was about them having been, as it were, pre-emptively widowed by the losses during the War and how that affected attitudes and policies. Has all the nuance and complexity of The Shadow of Marriage.

Women's History Review Special Issue 'Lone Mothers', Vol 20, 2011:

Pat Thane, 'Unmarried motherhood in twentieth-century England' - draws on her work on the National Council for the Unmarried Mother and Her Child and really interesting on a body which took up this very unpopular cause and agitated around it. How relatively few unmarried mothers were bringing up their children alone - might be in stable cohabitation but unable to marry, or child was absorbed into family - changes over time esp after WWII - issues around adoption, etc.

Ginger Frost, '"Revolting to Humanity": oversights, limitations and complications of the English Legitimacy Act of 1926' - a badly devised piece of legislation. Note that the fact that cases for legitimation were heard in open court put a lot of people off (as did the complicated bureaucracy). Easier for parent/s to adopt their own illegitimate children and thus give them legal status.

Leanne McCormick, Regulating Sexuality: women in twentieth-century Northern Ireland (2009)

2011-07-29T15:40:00.000+01:00

A splendidly meticulous study of the particular spins on various issues around women and sexuality in the context of Northern Ireland and the particular pressures that pertain there. We observe that not merely was there significant concern not to undertake policies that might disturb the Catholic population, but that the Protestant interest had very similar concerns relating to sexual morality. This led to a culture in which women were supposed to be the carriers of sexual purity (this clearly relates to wider issues of national and cultural identity) and particularly stigmatised and blamed for behaviours considered immoral. In fact the book sits very neatly between e.g. Luddy's work on the discourse of pure Irish womanhood and its implications for transgressors, and Davidson and Davies's work on late C20th Scottish sexual culture.

McCormick covers a great deal of ground with considerable effect: prostitution and the role of refuges and rescue homes (where her work finds similar phenomena to those uncovered by Luddy in her study of prostitution in Ireland), various strategies of preventive work such as organisations aimed at providing healthy and chaste recreation for young women (Belfast, in particular, has a high proportion of women in the workforce for whom these arguably provided a valuable social resource), treatment and prevention of VD (including the reluctance of several local authorities to admit that this was anything like a problem requiring action in their areas), the arrival of US troops in significant numbers during the Second World War and the various clashes of sexual cultures that produced, and attempts to establish birth control clinics. Abortion remains illegal in Northern Ireland, but McCormick suggests that there was a significant degree of illicit abortion taking place (some of it by doctors), while particularly of more recent decades facilities available on the mainland have been resorted to.

As McCormick has focused her study on women there is nothing about the failure to extend the 1967 decriminalisation of male homosexuality and the problem of homosexuality in Northern Ireland. It would have been intriguing to have had something about lesbianism but one imagines that this would be extremely difficult to retrieve, at least much before the end of the C20th. However, we get enough sense of the general moral climate to be able to make some speculations.

Adrian Bingham, Gender, Modernity and the Popular Press in Inter-War Britain (2004)

2011-07-20T21:28:00.001+01:00

A very good piece of work, looking specifically at the popular dailies of the period and their extremely polyvocal take on issues of gender. Makes a good point about the papers positioning themselves as about 'modernity', and issues of feminisation of their presentation and the types of things they dealt with, even beyond the actual women's pages. Not just about reinscribing traditional gender roles - some of that but because there are so many people writing in any given paper on any given day with different slants what they were getting across was a good deal more complex.

Even if there was a tendency to be 'yay modern girl - particularly in a bathing suit', with the increasing use of eroticised photographs of attractive women. But did get serious feminist voices out there too, even if there was often an agenda of drumming up sales-gleaning controversy.

Also has good chapter specifically on representations of masculinity and attitudes about men (which also comes up in the war and peace chapter - the contrasting figures of the decorated hero who says never again, the shell-shocked veteran, and the languid foppish postwar male who hadn't fought).

Catching up on journal literature and chapters XII

2011-07-17T17:30:00.000+01:00

Adrian Ager and Catherine Lee, 'Prostitution in the Medway Towns, 1860-1885', Local Population Studies, 83, 2009, 39-55: a really useful piece on the local factors affecting the extent of prostitution in the Medway towns (the pull factor that there was a major military presence, the push factor that the social make-up of the area was that there was not a huge demand for domestic service and no industries employing women, and also the fact that some of the economic activity of the region, e.g. hopping, was highly seasonal). Show what can be done by looking at an array of source and the possibilities of recreating at least some information about individuals from their encounters with police, prison, poor law institutions, etc . Not sure that this would be possible for London? or would it, if one started focussing in on particular areas - question of whether there was actually a downward eastward shift in the prostitute career (?suggested by Walkowitz I think) over time, or whether they stayed closer to any particular base. There's also the question (this may apply less in an area like the Medway towns) of non-street forms of prostitution in which the women were less publicly visible and disturbing - these are touched on in the 1916 volume Downward Paths as existing but much harder to investigate. Thus, Ager and Lee's confirmation of the poverty/prostitution link may be about one particular form of sex-work. But this is still a really valuable piece of work.

Two papers by Roger Davidson and Gayle Davis, from their detailed and industrious investigation of sexuality and governance in late C20th Scotland: '"A Field for Private Members: The Wolfenden Committee and Scottish Homosexual Law reform, 1950-1967", Twentieth Century British History, 15, 2004, pp 174-201, and '"A Festering Sore on the Body of Society": The Wolfenden Committee and Female Prostitution in mid-C20th Scotland', Journal of Scottish Historical Studies, 24, 2004, pp 80-98: full of dense and juicy material, but the take-home impression is that the Scots thought they were already managing both problems a lot better than the English; and that the level of homophobia was if anything even greater (to the extent that the only way to pass the 1967 Act was to exclude Scotland from its provisions to prevent Scottish MPs from voting against it).

James Vernon, '"For Some Queer Reason": The Trials and Tribulations of Colonel Barker's Masquerade in Interwar Britain', Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 26, 2000, 37-61. A very juicy piece about the problematic 'Colonel Barker' (Valerie Arkell Smith) and the questions it raises about gender. sexual, identity, masquerade, etc at the period, as well as the claiming of Barker by various contemporary groups as a precursor. Lots of resonances with other phenomena of the period (e.g. a trial which becomes less about the main charge of perjury than Barker's masquerade and nature of the 'marriage' - cf Lucy's work, and Stopes vs Sutherland).

Lutz D H Sauerteig and Roger Davidson, Shaping Sexual Knowledge: A Cultural History of Sex Education in C20th Europe (2009)
Intriguing piece from a rather different perspective by Ann Blair and Daniel Monk, 'Sex Education and the Law: The Importance of Legal Narratives' pp 17-51: though again, the tension/boundary between health and the child-in-educational-setting does seem to be significant. Problems of having to obey a set of rules and how they are interpreted.
Roger Davidson (solo), 'Purity and Pedagogy: The Alliance-Scottish Council and School Sex Education in Scotland, 1955-1967' pp 91-107: role of alliances between official bodies and voluntary organisations - also, the place of specific dedicated individuals who try and get things done - the actual messages (within the standard medico -moral policing context - purity and danger.
Barbara Crowther, 'The Partial Picture: Framing the Discourse of Sex in British Educative Films of the early 1930s' pp 176-196: really not much of a genre for the period in question. There is 1936 specifically VD propaganda film A Test for Love in fictional cautionary tale format; 1931 How to Tell, produced by BSHC and is about what parents should tell children about sex - use of nature analogies, reproductive imperative, heteronormativity; The Mystery of Marriage 1931 an info-tainment work drawing parallels, with voice-over narration, with various animal species, plants, and exotic peoples from a long way away - humorous tone.

Catching up on journal literature and chapters XI

2011-07-16T17:42:00.000+01:00

Judy Giles, ‘"Playing Hard to Get": working‐class women, sexuality and respectability in Britain, 1918‐40', Women's History Review, 1:2, 239-255: useful piece using oral history methodology re working class women's sexual attitudes in interwar period. Importance of self-assertion and standing up for oneself - not a submissive passive stereotype.

Lucy Delap, Ben Griffin, Abigail Wills, The Politics of Domestic Authority in Britain since 1800 (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) - still working through this, but so far, very useful chapters:

Ginger Frost,. '"I am master here": Illegitimacy, Masculinity and Violence in Victorian England', pp 27-42: issues around male status, control over women and children, authority, etc, resentment against the mothers of their illegitimate offspring and the demands for support. Courts much more punitive towards the men who actually murdered their illeg offspring (contrasting to the relative leniency towards women who did so)

Gail Savage, '"…the instrument of an animal function: Marital Rape and Sexual Cruelty in the Divorce Court, 1858-1908' pp 43-57: ways women could effectively deploy accusations of sexually abusive behaviour within the context of marital disputes in the courtroom. They could bring charges of abusive or non-normative sexual demands by husbands in divorce and separation cases and could also use these as reasons to context cases for restitution of conjugal rights. Divorce Court judges were actually v severe on male sexual conduct perceived as transgressive (and their limits of normality were v narrow).

Two good pieces by Judith Walkowitz: 'Going Public: Shopping, Street Harassment, and Streetwalking in Late Victorian London', Representations 662, 1998, pp. 1-30 is a valuable extension of the material in City of Dreadful Delight concerning women in public urban spaces and makes lots of useful points; 'The "Vision of Salome": Cosmopolitanism and Erotic Dancing in Central London, 1908-1918', The American Historical Review, Vol. 108, No. 2 (April 2003), pp. 337-376 provides a wider context to Maud Allan and the 'Cult of the Clitoris' case, in particular issues of female performance and display and the rise of a female audience for same but not sure this is quite so relevant to my immediate needs as the previous.

Three articles from the Welsh social history journal Llafur: Gareth Williams, 'Compulsory Sterilisation of Welsh Miners' (no 3:3 1983 pp 67-73) was rather misleading, since this was in fact merely one of courses of action being advocated by one of the more rabid mainline eugenicists of the early 1930s who believed that miners were having too large families and also had issues about the Welsh, but it all remained in the relam of polemic. Margaret Douglas, 'Women. God and Birth Control: The first hospital birth control clinic'(no 6:4 1995, pp 110-122) was an interesting piece about the Marie Stopes sponsored clinic in Abertillery - the moving force was actually a local male Labour activist, and the whole thing appears to have foundered largely as a result of the overwhelming counter-reaction by charismatic local preacher, Rev Ifor Evans. Though it doesn't sound as though, for whatever reason, local women actually used the clinic much. Russell Davies, 'A Broken Dream: some aspects of sexual behaviour and the dilemma of the unmarried mother in South West Wales' (no 3:4, 1984, pp. 24-33) Starts with the prevalent notion of rural Wales as a land of pure morals - uncorrupted by industry or the incursions of the English. In fact the relevant areas had far higher rates of illegitimacy than more urbanised parts. Attitudes towards the women in question tended to be punitive and the women in question often even failed to carry actions for affiliation and support. Local magistrates were also dismissive of cases of sexual assault.

Also on Wales, Julie Grier, 'Eugenics and Birth Control: Contraceptive Provision in North Wales, 1918-1939', Social History of Medicine vol 11, 1998, pp 443-458: suggests that in the period in question, initiatives in North Wales, when they occurred at all, were largely down to local politicians and medics who were often about a eugenic agenda. The more pressing issues of maternal health were much less in play. Significance, that we find elsewhere, of particular local individuals.

Partly on Wales, but also drawing on her work on Oxfordshire, Kate Fisher's 'Contrasting cultures of contraception: Birth control clinics and the working-classes in Britain between the wars', in M Gijswijt-Hofstra, G M Van Heteren and E M Tansey, Biographies of Remedies: Drugs, medicines and contraceptives in Dutch and Anglo-American Healing Cultures (Clio Medica 66, Rodopi, 2002) is persuasive about the problems that clinics had in actually appealing to the constituency they were aiming for. Fisher argues that there was a huge disjunction between the mindset of the campaigners for contraception and the women who were their intended audience, which meant that the services offered by clinics often met significant resistance from those they aimed to help.

Preserving the record of the Big Society

2011-07-11T20:15:00.000+01:00

Voluntary sector archives: A hidden casualty of the cuts

The Voluntary Action History Society blog draws attention to the serious problems relating to the preservation of archives of voluntary organisations. This is a particularly endangered sector: many voluntary bodies do not have a permanent HQ, and even when they do, looking after their records is not usually the most immediate priority, while inappropriate storage, office moves, changes of administrator, etc, are a constant source of threat.

If we're supposed to be aiming for the 'Big Society' (a concept which in itself suggests a fairly radical misunderstanding of or ignorance of history) might one venture that those who ignore history are likely to repeat its errors and that the history of voluntary action is hardly possible to reconstruct without the archives of the innumerable organisations engaged in it.

Forthcoming in person appearance

2011-07-11T13:55:00.000+01:00

The Thing Is... Caught in the act: 20 July 2011, 19.00 - 20.00, at the Wellcome Collection, where I shall be conversing about the Contagious Diseases Acts, Victorian prostitution, venereal diseases, etc at an event connected with the current Dirt exhibition

Catching up on journal literature and chapters X

2011-07-09T16:45:00.000+01:00

Actually a book, but only the first section seemed particularly relevant to my purposes: Mary Wilson Carpenter, Imperial Bibles, Domestic Bodies: women. sexualities and religion in the Victorian Market (2003): useful stuff on 'family bibles' - unlike the Family Shakespeare of Bowdler note, the Bible couldn't very well be Bowdlerised, but family versions with the dodgy stuff in Very Small Print &/or marked as 'Not for Family Reading' were a widespread phenomenon. Also causes one to consider the role of the Bible as under-examined source of sexual knowledge.

Pat Thane, 'Family Life and "Normality" in Postwar British Culture', in Richard Bessel and Dirk Schumann (eds), Life after Death: approaches to a cultural and social history of Europe during the 1940s and 1950s (2003). This was a really excellent piece on the distinctiveness of the postwar era and deconstructing the popular vision of the 50s in Britain as some lost era of 'normality'.

Alysa Levene, 'Family breakdown and the ‘Welfare Child’ in 19th and 20th century Britain' History of the Family 11 (2006) 67–79 - possibly a bit peripheral for my purposes, but some possible points to consider about the boundaries of 'the family' and issues around the 'contaminated/ing' child.

Gail Savage, ' They Would if They Could: Class, Gender, and Popular Representation of English Divorce Litigation, 1858-1908', Journal of Family History, 2011 36: 173. Yet another addition to Savage's string of important articles and chapters on divorce and marital law. A very illuminating analysis of who was actually accessing the Divorce Court, the role of class (a far greater percentage of the poor than one might think), the importance of an income to women who wanted divorces (i.e. upper class women with settled incomes, and actresses were in a much better position to bring the action), the distorting effect of what got reported in the press (upper class vice and bohemian decadence), etc,

Andrew Davies, 'Youth, violence, and courtship in late-Victorian Birmingham: The case of James Harper and Emily Pimm', History of the Family 11 (2006) 107–120, The 'othering' of sexual violence and domestic abuse by representing these as typical of the lower classes, plus assumptions that the women in question didn't mind it or even accepted it, even though Pimm had been making strenuous efforts to protect herself from Harper and his assumption that their relationship was not over.

Lucy Bland, 'White Women and Men of Colour: Miscegenation Fears in Britain after the Great War' Gender & History, Vol 17, issue 1, 2005, 29-61. Extremely valuable piece on the various allotropes of racist fears in the interwar period, from the immediately postwar race riots in port towns to the Eugenics Society-sponsored research on mixed-race children.

Julia Ann Laite (2008): The Association for Moral and Social Hygiene: abolitionism and prostitution law in Britain (1915–1959), Women's History Review, 17:2, 207-223. It's more than time that someone paid attention to the work of the AMSH into the C20th, and Laite does this extremely well.

Lucy Bland, ‘The Trials and Tribulations of Edith Thompson: the Capital Crime of Sexual Incitement in 1920s England’ Journal of British Studies, 47, 2008, pp 624-648. This makes an interesting contrast to Blands' study of the Mme Fahmy case. Thompson did not kill her husband, was shocked when Bywaters attacked him, but nonetheless got depicted as a dangerous siren and hanged.

Stephen Brooke - 'Gender and Working Class Identity in Britain during the 1950s' - Journal of Social History 34:4 2001, 773-795. Good on the issues around changing masculinity (though poss could do with more on male dandyism. Teds, etc?) , also the romanticisation of the old-style (imaginary?) working class 'mum' - denigration of 'modern girls' (but isn't this always the case - they are always being criticised for frivolity and pleasure-seeking and obsession with dress etc, and then they get married - it's a life-cycle thing)

Catching up on journal literature IX (and chapters in edited volumes)

2011-07-04T14:13:00.000+01:00

Shani D'Cruze, Everyday Violence in Britain, 1850-1950: Gender and Class (Harlow: Longman, 2000). This has some excellent and for my purposes extremely useful essays:

Kim Stevenson, '"Ingenuities of the female mind": legal and public perceptions of sexual violence in Victorian England, 1850-1890' pp 89-103

Joanne Jones '"She resisted with all her might": sexual violence against women in late C19th Manchester and the local press' pp 104-118

Jacky Burnett 'Exposing "the inner life": the Women's Cooperative Guilds's attitude to "cruelty"' pp 136-152 - how working class women perceived cruelty: far more broadly than the physical - and husbands were often aware of the limits and avoided doing anything that would constitute legal grounds for separation. Plus, rape in marriage definitely seen as an issue.

Julie English Early, 'Keeping ourselves to ourselves: violence in the Edwardian suburb' pp 170-184: attitudes to the suburb, itself a rather feminised space perhaps, and perceptions of the slovenly yet consumerist suburban housewife and how these stereotypes of bad wifeness were in play in the Crippen case (Crippen as 'poor little man' who had rid himself of a monster)

Lucy Bland, 'The trial of Madame Fahmy: Orientalism, violence, sexual perversity and the fear of miscegenation' pp.185-197: classic piece on how issues around race, miscegenation and 'oriental perversions' trumped dodgy female character in case of (French) wife shooting (Egyptian) husband, positioning her as victim

Andrew Mangham and Greta DePledge, The Female Body in Medicine and Literature (Liverpool University Press, 2011): a couple of good pieces for my purposes in this:

Laurie Garrison, '"She read on more eagerly, almost breathlessly": Mary Elizabeth Braddon's challenge to medical depictions of female masturbation in The Doctor's Wife' pp 148-168. Garrison is very sound on the position of female masturbation within the wider discourses on self-abuse, i.e. marginalised and either negligible or intensely pathologised. As always with this kind of reading of literary texts, I'm not entirely convinced there isn't a certain amount of overinterpretation (why I liked Sharon Marcus's claims for surface reading so much). However, anyone who points out that there are significant problems with the famous Sedgwick piece on Jane Austen and the masturbating girls gains points with me.

Emma L Jones, 'Representations of illegal abortionists in England, 1900-1967', 196-215. Extremely useful and thoroughly researched piece, including the important point that it's very difficult to track down the medical market in abortions except via fiction and memoir - the doctors who did get prosecuted tending to be marginalised figures for one or another reason who did not get any benefits from professional collegiality and back-covering. Notes that literary representations of back street abortions tends to focus on the more sensational and violent aspects. Evidence that women abortionists were concerned about hygiene - handwashing, use of disinfectant along with the soap, etc.

Going well with this, Tania Macintosh, 'An Abortionist City. Maternal Mortality, Abortion and Birth Control in Sheffield, 1920-1940' Medical History 44 (2000), , p. 75-97: local evidence, including use of the problematic but still useful Joint Council on Midwifery survey reports, the problems of definition of illegal/spontaneous, the way it was embedded in a fairly patriarchal industrial culture, the relative failure of local birth control clinics have an impact for that reason (though intriguing reference to dienoestrol being used at one, which I think like stilboestrol was being deployed as an abortifacient?).

K. Craig Gibson, 'Sex and Soldiering in France and Flanders. The British Expeditionary Force Along the Western Front, 1914-1919' The International History Review 23 (2001), p. 535-580. Mostly about relationships between men and local women, suggesting that even close to the front line there were women around (is countering idea that only those well behind the trenches had much access to women & sex), that contact were quite varied in nature, and that mostly if relationships did occur they were transient.

Philip Howell, 'Sex and the City of Bachelors. Sporting Guidebooks and Urban Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Britain and America' Ecumene 8 (2001), p. 20-51: extremely interesting piece on guidebooks aiming to provide a key to the metropolis and its delights alongside cautions about its dangers. Suggests that these were aspirational for relatively lower-class men, who were not the kind of men of the world who would have this kind of knowledge already. City as site of access to women: desires and anxieties. Misogyny.

Stephen Brooke, 'A New World for Women? Abortion Law Reform in Britain During the 1930s' American Historical Review 106 (2001), , p. 431-459. Makes important point about the complexity of the case ALRA was making for reform - that the maternalism is not just about pro-natalism, it's an empowered/ing maternalist rhetoric.

Rebecca Jones, '"That's Very Rude, I Shouldn't be Telling you That" . Older Women Talking about Sex' Narrative Inquiry 12 (2002), , p. 121-143. Not in fact what I was expecting (older women telling younger women about sex): it's pretty much current awareness and playing off from the idea that 'people think old people are sexless/shouldn't be having sex' and the liberal (one woman called it 'Woman's Hour') notion that of course they should, and found that respondents were engaging with both these notions and having problems of fit.

Another Stopes post on the Wellcome Library blog

2011-06-30T16:57:00.000+01:00

Since one of my colleagues has just catalogued a copy of Marie Stopes's rather justly forgotten 1928 novel, Love's Creation (where was this when I was trying to write an article on the subject in the early 90s? - a friend had to provide me with a photocopy, which was not the most convenient way to read it), I have composed a post for the Wellcome Library blog on A lesser-known side of Marie Stopes. I must be one of the few people who's ever read this work, in fact I think I probably read it twice in the course of working on the article. Her gifts did not lie in the sphere of fiction.

Catching up on journal literature VIII

2011-06-28T20:17:00.000+01:00

Stefan Slater, 'Pimps, Police and Filles de Joie: Foreign Prostitution in Interwar London', The London Journal, Vol. 32, No. 1, March 2007, 53–74: why did foreign, esp French, women come to London, particularly Soho for sex work? 'Frenchness' as titillating USP. Article uses records of the Metropolitan Police relating to foreign prostitution and the racket in arranged marriages by pimps, and also considers why this was a site for the expression of concern: Englishness/foreignness and prostitution. (A longstanding set of connections, from the 1850s stuff about French impures to the traffickers of today.)

T G Ashplant, 'Dis/connecting Whiteness. Biographical Perspectives on Race, Class, Masculinity and Sexuality in Britain, c. 1850-1930', L'homme 16 (2005), p. 68-85: useful about how ideas of the Other and playing with masquerade as the Other were about defining the hegemonic male identity: though the examples given are limited, and perhaps rather idiosyncratic figures, e.g. Munby, I think there's something there - the idea of the hegemonic male who can 'pass' and is a heroic figure rather than the masquerading subaltern trying to deceive... Complexity about the contrasts and dynamics.

Sam Pryke, 'The Boy Scouts and the "Girl Question" Sexualities 4 (2001), p. 191-211. Fears that associating with gurllzz was prematurely sexualising Edwardian/Georgian boys and leading them astray into unmanly ways. Very classed view of the appropriate and inappropriate young woman (cf Baden-Powell in Rovering to Success) . 'Walking out' as a bad habit if participant too young. Association with urban life and its problems. Not monolithic within the Scouting movement - some thought women (at least of the right kind) could be a good influence.

Stephen Brooke, 'Bodies, Sexuality and the "Modernization" of the British Working Classes, 1920s to 1960s' :International Labor and Working-Class History (2006), 69. Actually that is women's bodies, and he posits a change from the overburdened worn-out multiparous mother of interwar birth control movement rhetoric to a new healthier fitter woman with a smaller family and a companionate marriage - although there were regional continuities with the older model of the oppressed victim working class wife. Possibly rather slides over except in a couple of paragraphs the agency of working class women between the wars (it really wasn't all middle class women with an agenda). New meanings of sexuality post-war? (Difference here between rhetoric/ideology and people's experience

Catching up on journal literature VII

2011-06-27T19:32:00.000+01:00

Carol Smart 'Reconsidering the Recent History of Child Sexual Abuse, 1910-1960' Journal of Social Policy 29 (2000), p. 55-73: v useful piece on this subject - a) it was not just the evil influence of psychoanalysis that militated against people realising the prevalence of child sexual abuse, the way the courts and the criminal justice system dealt with it was really very very problematic and was pretty much set into assumptions that children lie and that false accusations were rife and failing to take on board the trauma of court appearance for children etc (plus, incestuous fathers still had huge legal patriarchal powers) b) but feminist and social purity organisations and women doctors and a few concerned magistrates were already saying this in the 1920s - there was a 1920s Royal Commission on Sexual Offences Againt Young People

Ivan Crozier,'Rough Winds do Shake the Darling Buds of May. A Note on William Acton and the Sexuality of the (Male) Child', Journal of Family History 26 (2001), p. 411-420 : Acton and educating (warning/terrifying) the young boy as the best strategy against the evils of self-abuse.

Elizabeth Stephens, 'Pathologising Leaky Male Bodies: spermatorrhoea in C19th British medicine and popular anatomical museums', Journal of the History of Sexuality 17 (2008), pp 421-438: excellent - points out that it was not just imposed by evil docs, men themselves bought into the pathologisation of the leaking oozing male body. Shift from anatomical museums to docs warning against 'quackery' at time of the Medical Act, but still promoting spermatorrhoea as a disease entity. Wider discourse of problematic male sexuality - suggests that the fearful secret was becoming like the femininised body, weak, feeble, excessive etc

Philip Howell, 'Sex and the City of Bachelors. Sporting Guidebooks and Urban Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Britain and America' Ecumene 8 (2001), p. 20-51: v good, about how to know the city, the city as male space, the need for knowingness and initiation, these guidebooks as aspirational texts (cf M Collins on Playboy etc) for wouldbe working/lower middle class 'swells' rather than actual men about town. Bachelor culture 'The city is/as woman/women' - desires and fears

Katie Hindmarch-Watson, 'Lois Schwich, the Female Errand Boy. Narratives of Female Cross-Dressing in Late-Victorian London' GLQ. A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 14 (2008),pp 69-98: the different narratives in different places about Schwich, young woman of 20 who had masqueraded as an adolescent errand boy, found out largely through involvement in criminal activities (theft, and trying to incriminate other people) at work. Class, gender, issues, etc, questions of particular urban spaces. As a boy she was very much in the working class 'swell' mode of dress, also smoking etc. Paper points out that much of the historiography and stories of female cross-dressers involves criminality (which may just be because those are the cases that came to light???)

Pamela Cox,'Compulsion, Voluntarism, and Venereal Disease. Governing Sexual Health in England after the Contagious Diseases Acts' Journal of British Studies 46 (2007), p. 91-115: really useful piece about the means of compulsion outside actual practices of articulated governance employed upon various groups who didn't match the model of citizen capable of taking responsibility/being responsible for their own health - predominantly women/girls/children. The invisibility of these processes and the involvement of voluntary philanthropic bodies.

Catching up on journal literature VI

2011-06-25T16:36:00.000+01:00

Matt Houblrook, '"The Man with the Powder Puff'" in interwar London', The Historical Journal 50, 1(2007) pp.145–171: useful stuff on changes about perceptions of men seeking sex with other men, in the light of wider changes to do with the increasing acceptability and respectability of women using cosmetics, and the role of material objects in policing practices.

Claire Langhamer, 'Adultery in post-war England', History Workshop Journal, 62, Autumn 2006, pp. 86-115: excellent stuff about the changing significance of adultery as marriage-breaking in tandem with the new companionate vision of marriage - i.e. physical fidelity becomes more important when the emphasis is on the emotional relationship rather than issues of good provider/good housekeeper etc. Also the idea that the ideal couple did everything together and shouldn't have separate interests - this intersected for me with Alison Oram's paper on our Berks panel and the citing of wife's over-involvement with female friends in cases of marriage breakup.

Derek Thompson,‘Courtship and marriage in Preston between the wars’, Oral History,3 (1975) (hand't seen this before: much-cited in various other things I looked at). Points for noting Mention of men being furtive buying condoms or going to pharmacy that was not local for them; importance of class and religion in socialisation and courtship; the different grades of dance-hall and 'monkey rack'; huge scandal of shotgun marriage plus the horror at unwed mothers (shame on family) etc

Helena Michie, 'Victorian Honeymoons. Sexual Reorientations and the "Sights" of Europe', Victorian Studies 43 (2001), p. 229-253: the rupture/rite de passage that the honeymoon was for both partners (entry to full adult masculine status for the male) and also for women (whole new identity and renaming) - poss leaning a bit hard on literary honeymoons (which she suggests may give a darker picture than the real thing!)

Charles Barker, 'Erotic Martyrdom. Kingsley's Sexuality Beyond Sex' Victorian Studies 44 (2002), p. 465-488 Wellcome non-electronic before 2006 : interesting but question arises of how typical were Kingsley and Fanny exchanging their heated courtship letters (author makes nice analogy with phone sex)

Christopher Matthews, 'Love at First Sight. The Velocity of Victorian Heterosexuality' Victorian Studies 46 (2004), p. 425-455: evicence from paintings and literary texts mostly, men as falling in love at first sight and that this is problematic (deceptive women).

Angela Cassidy, 'The (Sexual) Politics of Evolution. Popular Controversy in the Late 20th-Century United Kingdom' History of Psychology 10 (2007), p. 199-226 Interesting about the popular media interest in the revival of evolutionary psychology from 1990s, but it was also being reworked away from the standard conservative gender dynamics by feminists (to some extent - the pop narrative seems to me to be pretty much wedded to the conservative primeval savanna vision?)

Martin J. Wiener 'The Sad Story of George Hall. Adultery, Murder and the Politics of Mercy in Mid-Victorian England', Social History 24 (1999), p. 174-196: case which illuminated shifts c. 1860s in the acceptability of wife murder on provocation - in the Hall case large amounts of public sympathy (his wife had been carrying on with a lover with whom she had had a premarital relationship) vs increasing judicial desire not to let this kind of thing go - he was reprieved as often happened when case could be made for wife's provocation and husbandly innocence (e.g he was not abusive) but the law was tightening up around this time: in this case public pressure was heavily involved in grant of reprieve. Changing paradigms of manliness to a more caring one (rather than ownership & power) / general anti-violence tendencyat ht the period.

UNESCO UK Memory of the World Register 2011

2011-06-23T11:05:00.000+01:00

On 23 May 2011 twenty items and collections became the second round of inscriptions to the UK Memory of the World Register
It is extremely gratifying to see important collections relating to women's history in this batch - not only Documentary Heritage of the Women's Suffrage Movement in Britain, 1865-1928 (joint project of the Women's Library and the Parliamentary Archives), but the diaries of Anne Lister (at West Yorkshire Archive Service) - and also the Edinburgh and Lothian HIV/AIDS Collections, 1983-2010 in Lothian Health Services Archives).

Some recent research reading

2011-06-21T20:45:00.000+01:00

Anthony Aldgate and James C Robertson, Censorship in Theatre and Cinema (2005). Useful in that it is more about the ongoing routine work of theatre and cinema censorship up to to the 1970s (not just on sexual grounds). The case studies it uses are of plays which were made into films (or which, after much to and froing, weren't, or in a very transmuted form) and the different concerns that arose (e.g. theatre as relatively elite venue vs cinema as having a more popular audience). Interesting on the minutiae of language and gesture with which censors concerned themselves.

Sarah F Green, Urban Amazons: Lesbian Feminism and Beyond in the Gender, Sexuality and Identity Battles of London (1997). Green was a participant observer anthropologist of a particular element within the London lesbian feminist scene of the 80s as Thatcherism began to bite. Raises issues of how far politics can be defined around sexual orientation and the problems that arose of definition around who could claim authentic identity. Covers the 'lesbian sex wars' of that period. Note that conflict points arose over wider issues of diversity and representation. Also, interesting on relationship styles - while the communal experiments of the 70s seem to have been pretty much over, there was emphasis on friendship and community and coupledom rather played down.

Looking back at the Berks, before it all fades entirely

2011-06-20T20:18:00.000+01:00

Panels I attended:
Friday:

'The True Sex? cases of gender ambivalence and their impact in Europe'; four papers, one on the various later redeployments of the tale of Phaethousa the bearded lady in the Hippocratic corpus; two on cases of 'hermaphroditism' in late C19th Denmark (covering some of the same material but with a different slant); the case of Lili Elbe and her (posthumously created) autobiography Man into Woman. This was a tightly run panel that worked well. Papers very much about how society uses stories of gender ambivalence for various purposes.

'Healthy babies, healthy families: generations of health care in South Asia': this also had four papers, but could have done with rather stricter moderation as the session ran out of time - it was already at time when the discussant started to comment. This was a pity, because they were all very interesting pieces in themselves: the politics of milk and infant welfare in early C20th Madras; reconstructing ideas of masculinity and fatherhood in late C19th Bengal; the role of A Pillay and the Bombay-published International Journal of Sexology within mid-C20th sexology; the time and place-specific nature of a post-Partition translation/version of the Kama Sutra

Saturday:

'Love, Desire, Community and Friendship: reconsidering female same-sex relationships in the early to mid C20th': this was the panel I organised and spoke on. I think it went well - the room was encouragingly full, we all kept to time, and there was good discussion. But what would I know.

'Leatherwomen's histories: international perspectives from academic and public historians': 'international' in this context actually meant the USA and Canada (and I think one of the participants had worked on curating materials in Mexico) - however, it was clear that there were distinctive differences in history and that the crisis points were not the same in these two close and fairly culturally similar milieux. Panel also shed some light on the development of communities which seemed of much wider application (from a small group looking outward, or defining itself against that larger world, to a larger but less cohesive, even riven, group). Also, issues of marginalisation of certain categories within already marginalised groups.

'Contesting the boundaries of Christian sexuality': unfortunately one panelist had dropped out (English Catholics, contraception and the response to Humanae Vitae), but the two that were left worked very well together - one on Mary Scharlieb and her emphasis on the importance of sex education in the context of social purity, and the other on D Sherwin Bailey's elaborate theology of marriage produced at more or less precisely the mid-point of the C20th. V useful.

Sunday:

The Sunday morning sessions were all round-tables with precirculated papers. I hadn't actually managed to read any of the papers, but I went to the excellent and wide-ranging 'Motherhood and the State in the waning age of Empire', which covered a broad geographical range and raised a lot of exciting questions about mothering, invisible labour, the role of the state, NGOs, race, class, colonialism, ambivalence responses to apparently coercive and colonialising practices, the impact of wider global phenomena on policy, etc etc etc.

O dear, why did I expect anything different?

2011-06-17T10:44:00.000+01:00

Well, The Sex Researchers on Channel 4 last night pretty much did all the things I was assured they were not going to do when they approached me to do an interview and advise, in terms of being simplistic, sensationalistic, cliched, and condescending. Not to mention muddled and full of self-contradiction, heterosexist, male-gazey, and full of annoying little 'amusing' animations and comic reconstructions, busy-busy snippets from films of various periods, etc etc (which I suppose are all part of some belief that tv docs have to keep things moving all the time).

A detail-by-detail critique of its failures as history would be very long indeed, so I'll just mention two particular gruesomenesses.

They disseminated and perpetuated in a particularly crass and mangled-up form the canard about C19th doctors, hysteria, masturbating women and vibrators.

Condescension towards Virginia Johnson, who was surely one of a long line of women in numerous fields who found herself in the right place at the right time and thus enabled to fulfill the potential that women were largely supposed not to have and given no encouragement to develop (hello, it was the 50s - a lot of very intelligent and gifted women were being shunted off into the secretarial pool at that period). It's not as though there was a formal set of qualifications for anyone doing sex research at that time, man or woman.

I was also stunned that they could leap from Havelock Ellis to Masters & Johnson without mentioning anyone in the decades in between: not even Kinsey.

Maybe this is not much more embarrassing than finding my comments on Victorian prostitution, etc, intercut with live-action dramatisation of scenes from 'Walter''s My Secret Life. It still doesn't qualify as a high point in my career.

The Sex Researchers, Channel 4

2011-06-16T16:01:00.000+01:00

A series of 3 programmes on The Sex Researchers is being broadcast on Channel 4: the first one tonight at 10 pm and the others in a week's and a fortnight's time. I recorded an interview for this but have no idea what, if anything, made the final cut.

Dr Petra Boynton (who was also interviewed for these programmes) reflects on the media depictions of sex research in her own blog and considers some of the problems and pitfalls for academic researchers in the area engaging with the media, as well as the possibilities.

I'm at the Berks!

2011-06-10T02:35:00.000+01:00

That is, the triennial Berkshire Conference on the History of Women: fifteenth this year, being held at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. I have previously attended in 1996 (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), 2002 (University of Connecticut at Storrs), 2005 (The Claremont Colleges, CA), 2008 (University of Minnesota at Minneapolis).

So far I have attended my first panel, a rather envy-making panel by archivists from the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College on 'Teaching the Archives' and how they work with students to introduce them to the archives and how they are used and how valuable it is for users to be able to interact with an archivist.

While there is no doubt that latterly I seem to have been able to give more time to cataloguing, with consequent sense of achievement, I do feel that certain changes in workplace practice mean that the archivists no longer have routine contact with readers and that we lose valuable educational opportunities thereby, since there is no formal mechanism for user education apart from sessions arranged by specific tutors or course supervisors.

The development of online access to finding aids is a great boon, but for individuals unacquainted with the way archives work they may be something of a false friend, by detaching specific items from their embedded context within particular collections. And, as Maida Goodwin made a strong point of saying, archives are not like Google, you don't get a result by asking a specific question but by looking at the sources and being guided by them.

I am not sure how one gets round this. Interaction with users came through being involved in a number of routine operational tasks, and in many cases there was no real need for extensive interaction or guidance. Also, many users now get in touch in advance for advice. But there are still those who are perhaps floundering or missing sources that might be relevant. I do sometimes get the impression that students are not effectively briefed by tutors or supervisors about primary sources and the differences between them, and how to approach them.

Obviously, it is also important to make the holdings actually available by getting them catalogued, flagged in sources guides, noted in blog posts, etc. There are a number of repetitive queries that come up that really can be answered adequately by reference to a thematic guide or with a form response or simply by explaining how to use the online catalogue. But sometimes, particularly with novice users, a bit more is required. Not that novice users (or even quite experienced users) realise that this is desirable.

Besides attending this panel, I attended the opening reception and met various old acquaintances and made a few new ones.

Catching up on journal literature V

2011-06-09T02:36:00.000+01:00

(Bless the e-reader and access to journal subscriptions that permit downloading of articles: boo to the constraints of the BL ILL system which won't enable this useful and ecologically sound way of reading articles).

Harry Cocks, 'Saucy Stories: Pornography, sexology, and the marketing of sexual knowledge in Britain, c. 1918-70' Social History, 29, 2004, pp. 465-484. Looking at issues of distribution and context and how these inflected the way seriously intended works of sexology were perceived. Perhaps doesn't give enough weight to the mid-term in this equation - the catchpenny hackwork of e.g. George Ryley Scott which mined the works of sexologists to produce popular works. Also, omits the Chesser Love without Fear case which is an interesting one, and about what should and shouldn't be in a book of reputable marital advice (I really must read the copy of the original first edition I got hold of!), and doesn't really consider the position of women and social purity in this. They were often pro sex advice - Maude Royden, as I recall, testified for Edward Charles' The Sexual Impulse and Letitia Fairfield for Love without Fear. More of a spectrum there perhaps. But it's a useful article and led me in context of these others to think about space and location and context. Also, class. I'm by no means persuaded that in UK context class is outmoded category in thinking about sexual attitudes.

Frank Mort, 'Striptease: the erotic female body and live sexual entertainment in midtwentieth London', Social History, 32, 2007, pp. 27-53. Not sure if this differs essentially from the chapter in Capital Offences, but it was useful to read in the context of these other articles, and think about space, location and specificity of situation. And things and place which (like the Windmill) are somehow an acceptable exception to normal moral policing. But not infinitely multipliable (uniqueness - e.g. the liminality of the Windmill's physical placing on the borders of Soho and legit theatreland. Interesting thought on the replacement of the street theatre of Soho prostitution after 1959 by 'private' clubs (cf also Houlbrook on the privatised bourgeois respectable homosexual of the 50s).

Matt Houlbrook, 'The Private World of Public Urinals in London, 1918-1957', The London Journal, 25, 2000, pp. 52-70; another look at place and different meanings ascribed to it, and the place of policing practices within the dynamic (bumping up arrest figures). Very useful.

James Hampshire, 'The politics of school sex education policy in England and Wales from the 1940s to the 1960s', Social History of Medicine 18, 2005, pp. 87-105. As I've written on this topic myself in a chapter published a year previously (which isn't mentioned), I was a bit underwhelmed by this - Hampshire hasn't apparently used the Cyril Bibby papers at Cambridge. Also, although I would concur that there was a significant disjunction between the medical support for sex education and apathy or worse from the educationalists, even when they expressed general sympathy with the notion, I think he goes too far in assuming that medical opinion was united and monolithic on the subject! What is useful is that he's looked at the NUT as well as the Department of Education. However, it all leads me to conclude that all the parties (before the 70s, anyway) were generally in favour of sex education, but they wanted someone else to do it, not them. I think this may be the explanation behind a lot of the conflicted tale of sex ed in the UK. Parents want teachers to do it, other people want parents to do it, etc etc.

Katharine Holden, The Shadow of Marriage: Singleness in England, 1914-1960 (2007)

2011-06-04T16:26:00.000+01:00

This is a thoroughly excellent study of the meanings of being unmarried and what it was like and the problems involved in reconstructing this fairly substantial category of the population from the sources.

It's very valuable on the different meanings ascribed to singleness in women and in men and on the relative lack of any discussion of the latter except in terms of 'gay bachelors' resisting marriage.

In terms of my recent work on my paper for the Berks on female relationships at approximately the same period (and looking at many of the same sources, and yes, wasn't Laura Hutton rather remarkable?) I found her chapter on unmarried people (nearly all women) fostering or adopting (formally or informally) had significant resonances with the discussions of female friendship - that on the one hand it could be a valuable emotional substitute for the conventional satisfactions, but on the other there was the danger of emotional over-investment, possessiveness, domineering, etc. Also - some change over time - is seen as more potentially pathological in the post WWII era, which is also when there was shift in attitudes to unmarried mothers, from redemption through keeping the child and maternity to them being neurotic and unfit to mother and therefore the children should be adopted into 'normal' families.

Highly recommended: subtle and nuanced in its analysis, e.g. of the penalties and also the pleasures of being in a family carer role and how contextual those were.

Exhibition in Halifax Nova Scotia

2011-05-29T02:00:00.000+01:00

The Maritime Museum of the Atlantic is making history with Hello Sailor! Gay Life on the Ocean Wave. The exhibit, which looks at gay culture as part of seafaring life from the 1950s to present dapted from an exhibit created by National Museums Liverpool in England opens for the first time in North America at the museum.. It is based on Hello Sailor! The Hidden History of Gay Life at Sea, a book published by Jo Stanley and Paul Baker in 2003.

Wellcome blog post

2011-05-26T23:10:00.000+01:00

Recently posted an entry on the Wellcome Library blog about an interesting little group of correspondence relating to the war-work of the Strangeways Research Laboratory -The Strangeways Laboratory, ‘The Mustard Club’, and Honor Fell’s ‘aliens - although much of this related to the technicalites of research into toxic gases and counter-measures for the same, there was a significant degree of 'human interest', including Honor Fell's principled refusal to supply details of the contingent of German refugee scientists who had been working for quite some time at the Strangeways to the authorities so that they could be subjected to surveillance by the military police.

Also posted to the Wellcome Library blog by one of my colleagues - a chef tries out one of Lady Ann Fanshawe's C17th recipes

Helen Self, Prostitution, Women and Misuse of the Law: The Fallen Daughters of Eve (Cass, 2003)

2011-05-23T20:11:00.000+01:00

This was a really excellent study of official policies in the UK towards prostitution with an emphasis on the post-WWII era and an intensive focus on the Wolfenden Committee. As with Mort's work on the Committee, one gets the very strong sense that however much there was some degree of openmindedness towards homosexuals (at least ones who were more or less chaps like us), most of the committee members had their minds made up already about prostitution. Self is good on the contradictions - on the claims that it wasn't about morals, it was about public order and decency, while having a very stigmatising and pathologising view of the women involved. Again like Mort, shows that there was a very narrow construction of what counted as expertise, which drew a line excluding all the various women's organisations who had been dealing with the problem for nearly a century. Attempts to amend the law have been piecemeal and ad hoc and ineffective (a lot of it comes down to specific on the street policing, which varies wildly by area) and have even tended to make things worse for the sex-worker. Strongly indicates the lingering attitudes about the prostitute as a particular kind of person who can be defined and categorised and separated out, and how uphill the struggle has been to suggest that men's implication (as customers rather than ponces or pimps) is part of the problem - and this only really got dealt with in terms of kerb-crawling as public nuisance, in ways that tended to endanger the working women.

Catching up on journal literature IV

2011-05-22T21:30:00.000+01:00

More of an aide memoire for things I've looked at that are somewhat peripheral to my particular purposes at the moment, except for Roger Davidson, '"The Sexual State": Sexuality and Scottish Governance, 1950-1980', Journal of the History of Sexuality Vol 13, 2004, pp 500-521, which is very useful both on regionality and on the importance of specific local practices in Scotland, and the continuation of traditional moral attitudes and moral policing.

Also from Journal of the History of Sexuality:

Todd Avery, '"This intricate commerce of souls": The Origins and Some Early Expressions of Lytton Strachey's Ethics'. Vol 13 2004, pp 183-207: interesting in its suggestion that Strachey has been inaccurately depicted as taking G E Moore' ethics into a realm of elitisit aestheticism and that he was actually more engage both as an anti-Victorian anti-Imperialist and as a proponent of a (utopian?) vision of friendship. But a bit tangential to my current concerns.

James M Smith, 'The Politics of Sexual Knowledge: The Origins of Ireland's Containment Culture and the Corrigan Report (1931)', Vol 13 2004, pp. 208-233: good stuff about the new Irish state, the politics of national identity and the idea of itself as a Catholic and morally pure society - and how this led to victimisation of women and children (similar territory to Maria Luddy's later sections of Prostitution in Ireland). But not sure how much on Ireland I shall be able to include.

Ivan Crozier, 'Philosophy in the English Boudoir: Havelock Ellis, Love and Pain, and Sexological Discourse on Algophilia' Vol 13, 2004, pp 275-305: not so much about le vice anglais considered as a national phenomenon, more about Ellis and the wider (European/N American) sexological debates around sado-masochism.

Sally Newman, 'The Archival Traces of Desire: Vernon Lee's Failed Sexuality and the Interpretation of Letters in Lesbian History' - methodologically interesting but not really terribly pertinent to current project.

Another gratifying review for Stella

2011-05-21T17:21:00.000+01:00

June Purvis reviews The Life and Times of Stella Browne, Feminist and Free Spirit in THE: Times Higher Education.

Catching up on journal literature III

2011-05-17T21:02:00.000+01:00

Martha Vicinus, 'The Gift of Love. Nineteenth-Century Religion and Lesbian Passion', Nineteenth-Century Contexts 23 (2001), p. 241-265: wonderful article about Mary ('Minnie') Benson, wife of Edward White Benson, eventually Archbishop of Canterbury, who picked her out to be his future wife when she was 11 and married her once she was 18. This did not work out well, although they did have six children. Her affections for other women were well beyond the conventions of Victorian romantic friendship. This article shows how remarkably flexible Victorian marital and domestic arrangements could be, and is another important contribution to the recent research on the intersections between religion and sexuality in the C19th and C20th.

Philip Howell, 'A Private Contagious Diseases Act. Prostitution and Public Space in Victorian Cambridge' Journal of Historical Geography 26 (2000), p. 376-402. Useful article on the policing of prostitution in Cambridge according to long-standing traditional University systems of regulation, and for, in fact, similar reasons to the actual CD Acts - the bringing together of a significant number of unattached young men in one place. The University officers tended to believe that prostitution was an unfortunate necessity, but they did not want it flaunting in the public streets and offering open temptation and tried to confine it to the working-class suburb of Barnwell. The University was indeed operating something very like the CD Acts - with medical inspections and incarceration in the 'Spinning House', but Howell points out that far from being a modernising regime this was based on practices that had been in place for a very long time. The records do mean that one can get some sense of women's trajectories in the profession - many seem to have been arrested and incarcerated only once, others had lengthy careers, most were young but not all. One thing I didn't really see addressed in this article was the way that this problem was positioned as being about the undergraduates: at a period when college dons were still required to be unmarried, or had only just been permitted to wed, were they not a significant element in the potential clientele? (and might that not have led to embarrassing encounters?)

David Trotter, 'Some Brothels. Nineteenth-Century Philanthropy and the Poetics of Space' Critical Quarterly 44 (2002), p. 25-35, a rather short article looking at prostitute rescue philanthropy and the belief that the rescue worker had to go into the brothels, and the way they describe them. How this relates to urban spaces and public/private space confusions. Idea of the descent into places represented as filthy and abject as an intiation. (More to be done here?)

Richard Hornsey, 'The Sexual Geographies of Reading in Post-War London', Gender, Place and Culture 9 (2002), p. 371-38. Libraries and what they should be providing to readers; rise of the paperback; the distinction between the austere and tasteful Penguins and books with 'alluring and tawdry jackets' - 'railway bookstalls' and the move of sex-novelettes out of the backstreet 'magazine shop' into this liminal space. The tension between the reputation and perception of Penguins and the perceptions of Lady Chatterley's Lover leading to the trial. Where and how to read. Segues to discussion of books about homosexuality. Little difference in representation as 'tortured misfits' in medical and sociological works, and 'crude generic fiction'. Libraries were fairly okay with the 'serious' texts but the others were perceived as degraded bookstall fodder (often making quite misleading come-ons with the covers!). Orton and Halliwell's defacement of library books as a kind of queering performance art - presenting the unsuspecting reader who picks up one of them from the shelves with some new set of reading practices. (?'Matter out of place?)

Catching up on journal literature II

2011-05-16T21:40:00.000+01:00

Hera Cook, 'Sex and the Experts. Medicalisation as a Two Way Process, Britain 1920-1950' chapter in Usborne, Cornelie/Blécourt, Willem de (eds) Cultural Approaches to the History of Medicine. Mediating Medicine in Early Modern and Modern Europe (2003): tends to concur with my own views that these manuals were performing a work of enlightenment (not just introducing a new oppressive hegemony), and does useful analysis of various manuals along axes of male/female, medical/non-medical writers.

Pauline Phipps, 'Faith, Desire and Sexual Identity: Constance Maynard's Atonement for Passion', Journal of the History of Sexuality 18 (2009), pp. 265-286: an analysis of the first mistress of Westfield College University of London, and explores same-sex desires between women, the role of religion, and the fact that these relationships could have elements of abuse, at least on the emotional level (I rather wish I'd read this before sending off my Berks paper, since there seemed to me to be more than a little of Clemence Dane's Clare Hartill in Maynard).

Deborah Cohler, 'Sapphism and Sedition. Producing Female Homosexuality in Great War Britain', Journal of the History of Sexuality 16 (2007), p. 68-94: covering similar ground to her Citizen, Invert, Queer Looking at the relative fluidity and indeterminacy (or just confusion) around female same-sex desire towards the end of the Great War and the way discourses around nationalism and militarism played into it - looking at Allatini's Despised and Rejected and the Maud Allan case.

Richard Philips, 'Heterogeneous Imperialism and the Regulation of Sexuality in British West Africa', Journal of the History of Sexuality 14 (2005), pp 291-315: why did quite a lot of parts of the Empire in the C19th not have the CD Acts or anything along those lines? Uses Sierra Leone as a case-study. Other modes of sexual regulation going on. Specific local situtations and contingency. Flexibility of imperialism - response to contexts. Notes that in some places there was popular support for regulation (cf Tuck on Uganda). Attitudes towards 'the African'.

Brian Lewis, 'The Queer Life and Afterlife of Roger Casement' Journal of the History of Sexuality 14 (2005), pp. 363-383: about the ways in which Casement's homosexuality has been used, considered as a libellous product of forgery, etc. The problematic and contradictory elements of his sexuality - not 'a gay saint'. Puzzlement of contemporaries about the disjunction between his humanitarianism and what was seen as an appalling revelation.

Lisa Z Sigel, 'Name Your Pleasure: the Transformation of Sexual Language in Nineteenth Century British Pornography', Journal of the History of Sexuality 9 (2000), pp. 395-419: how the elaborate and celebratory, even quite baroque, descriptions of C18th erotica, give way to the use of 'filthy' obscene language. Which had previously been 'vulgar' but not smutty and arousing in the way it becomes in Victorian pornography. Sigel points out that most Victporn was for a middle-class audience and 'filth' had lots of class connotations, and that there is increasing association of sex & dirt, plus misogyny. Breaching of taboos. The 'emptying out' of erotic writing as suggested by Dorelies Kraak in the Sexual Cultures book.

A few website updates

2011-05-11T22:07:00.000+01:00

After rather too long a time, I have done updates to Recent Recommended Reading. I also continue to update History of Sexuality, Women's History, and Victoriana links as and when information comes to hand.

Possibly an over-emphasised area?

2011-05-09T22:11:00.000+01:00

Especially as the Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics was published last year.... How much more is there to say? Furthermore, I've just got off today a review of Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Managing the Body: Beauty, Health, and Fitness in Britain 1880-1939 (2010), which draws significant attention to the vast plethora of movements, individuals, government initiatives and commercial enterprises of the early to mid-C20th which were all about improving bodies and health through a range of interventions and initiatives. I am rather given to wonder whether these were not rather more influential, though a good deal less coherent, than the ideology of eugenics - but although so many people did passionately believe in strategies for improvement, there were such significant diversities of opinion about what these should actually be that this aspect of thinking about issues of nation and wellbeing was the antithesis of monolithic.

Call for Papers: The Study of Eugenics - Past, Present and Future
Uppsala University, Sweden 10 Nov 2011 - 11 Nov 2011
Deadline: 31 May 2011
The study of eugenics has been extensive in recent years and has yielded a detailed understanding of the origins, evolution and impact of eugenic beliefs and practices. This research has received much attention also outside of academic circles, not least because of the growing awareness of the widespread eugenic practices (like sterilization) in emerging welfare states like the Nordic countries. Here, historical scholarship has contributed to the ongoing reinterpretation of the "modern project". Much light has been shed on the relationship between eugenics and genetics before 1945, but the continuing relationship between these areas up to the present has not received enough attention, even though eugenic themes have been present in discussions about "ethical" issues in connection with various biomedical practices. This conference aims to bring together scholars in a variety of disciplines - history, the social sciences and philosophy among them - in order to discuss what the study of eugenics has achieved so far and what lies ahead, in ongoing and future research, including the relatively under-developed study of post-war eugenics.
The conference is open to contributions from various fields of research that may treat specific eugenic topics as well as historiographical questions. Accepted contributions will be arranged in thematic sessions by the organizers. The conference will last for two days and will open with keynote lectures by Professor Paul Weindling (Oxford Brookes University) on The Historiography of the History of Eugenics, and Dr. Marius Turda (Oxford Brookes University) on Eugenics and Society - The Path for Future Research.
The conference is organized by Living History Forum, Stockholm, and the Department of History of Science and Ideas, Uppsala University. Living History Forum is a government organisation that has been set up in order to spread knowledge and encourage research about issues associated with crimes against humanity (foremost the Holocaust). The Department of History of Science and Ideas is a major centre in Sweden for research in the history of medicine, including eugenics and related areas.
The organizers will cover the costs for meals and accommodation, and reimburse some travel expenses for participants who present papers. The number of papers that can be accepted is limited. If you want only to listen and participate in discussions you are heartily welcome but must still apply. More details regarding practical arrangements including a preliminary program will be sent out in mid June.
The deadline for applying to the conference is May 31.
Applications should include information about academic or other affiliation and research area. Those wishing to present a paper should include an abstract of no more than 300 words. Please note that the conference language is English.
Applications and questions should be directed to:
Annelie Drakman, annelie.drakman@idehist.uu.se

Sven Widmalm, professor Oscar Österberg, project manager
Dept. of History of Science and Ideas Living History Forum
Uppsala University Stockholm
Sven.widmalm@idehist.uu.se

oscar.osterberg@levandehistoria.se
www.idehist.uu.se
www.levandehistoriaca.se

Some intriguing looking conferences (which I doubt I shall be managing to attend)

2011-05-05T16:45:00.001+01:00

Yorkshire Women’s History Network inaugural one-day conference ‘Women on Others/Women as Others’ on Saturday 25^th June 2011 at Leeds Trinity University College.

Our keynote address will be by Professor Alison Oram (Leeds Met), and the schedule for the day is as follows:

8:45 Registration

9:15 Welcome

9:30 Keynote: Prof Alison Oram

10:30 Tea/Coffee break

11:30 Strand A: The Other at the fin-de-siècle

Ann Heilmann, (University of Hull), ‘The New Woman in China’

Grainne Goodwin, (Leeds Metropolitan University), ‘The othering of women writers professional sociability at the fin-de-siècle through the experiences of Flora Annie Steel’

12:30 Lunch

13:30 Meeting to Discuss the formation of the Yorks WHN

14:00 Strand B: Other languages, Other selves

Alison Torn, (LTUC), ‘Women & Madness: pre-Enlightenment and post-enlightenment examples of resisting and using the other

Baptiste Moniez, (Canterbury Christ Church University), ‘Other s among Others: British Single Missionary Women and the Cultural ‘Other’’

Mehdi Damali Amiri, (Bualisina University, Hamedan, Iran), ‘Women and their Hidden Idenity’

15:00 Tea/Coffee Break

15:30 Strand C:

Susan Anderson and Di Drummond, (LTUC), ‘Constructing and Reconstructing ‘The Other’: Changing Representations of Indian Women in British Imperial Discourses of the Sixteenth and Eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’

16:30 Close

Full conference registration, inclusive of lunch	£25
Student/unwaged concession conference registration, inclusive of lunch	£15

For further details and registration forms please contact Julie Wadsworth

j.wadsworth@leedstrinity.ac.uk

Midwifery in Scotland: Past and Present

2 June 2011

An Event to Celebrate the Launch of

Midwifery in Scotland: A History

Lindsay Reid

Speakers:

Ruth Honeybone, LHSA Paper Conservator

‘Midwifery Records in Lothian Health Services Archive’

Debbie Nicholson, University of West of Scotland,

‘Womb with a View’: Transforming ultrasound into a consumer technology

Book Discussants:

Cathy Warwick, General Secretary, Royal College of Midwives

Christine Hallett, University of Manchester

Iain Hutchison, University of Glasgow

From: 1.30-4.30

In: G3-4, School of Health in Social Science

The University of Edinburgh

Medical School

Teviot Place

Edinburgh EH8 9AG

If you haven’t already, please book by sending £10 to Margaret Lynch, De Partu Treasurer, University of Manchester, School of Nursing, Midwifery and Social Work, University Place, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL

SPORT AND GENDER WORKSHOP
Hosted by the International Football Institute, University of Central Lancashire
&
The British Society of Sports History
Friday 10
th June, 2011
Time Location: Greenbank Building, University of Central Lancashire
9:30 – 10:00 Registration and Refreshments
10:00 – 11:30 Panel 1: Women and Sport: Prejudice and Progress
Speakers:
Catherine Budd (De Montfort University)
"Entirely out of Their Sphere, and Calculated to Unsex Them in More Ways
than One!" Women and Sport in Middlesbrough, c.1880-1914
Carlos Caracciolio (National Institute for Geophysics and Volcanology, Italy):
Bicycles and Women (without Forgetting Men): Notes for an Italian History
Michelle Sikes (University of Oxford):
Absence, Emergence, Permanence: Conceptualising Social Change through the
Prism of Women's Running in Kenya
11:30 – 12:00 Break
12:00 – 1:30 Panel 2: Physical Culture, Gender and the Body
Speakers:
Sue Ash (Oxford Brookes University):
'Fit' Women: Aesthetic Movement or Eugenic Exercise in Early Twentieth
Century Britain?
Eilidh Macrae (University of Glasgow):
Conflicts of Fitness and Femininity: The Negotiation of Appropriate
Female Space in the 1937 Scottish Fitness Campaign
Veronique Czaka (University of Geneva/University of Lausanne):
Constructing Gender through Gymnastics at School: Discourse and Practice in
West Switzerland, 1860-1920
1:30 – 2:30 Lunch
2:30 – 4:00 Panel 3: 'Troubled' Masculinities and 'Subversive' Femininities
Speakers:
Sergio Lussana (University of Warwick)
'The Great Wrestler Can Win Laurels': Enslaved Fighting Contests and
Expressions of Masculinity in the Antebellum Southern United States
Dr Jean Williams (De Montfort University)
Speaking Softly: Roberta Cowell's Autobiography, Gender and Identity
Dr Stacey Pope (University of Bedfordshire )
'White Shoes to a Football Match!': Female Experiences of Football's 'Golden
Age' in England
4.00 – 4:30 Break
4:30 – 5:30 Round Table: Sport and Gender: Future Directions
Speakers:
Dr Carol Osborne (University of Cumbria)
Dr Fiona Skillen (University of Central Lancashire)
Dr Jean Williams (De Montfort University)
Dr Joyce Kay (University of Stirling)
Dr Fiona Skillen, FSkillen@UClan.ac.uk
International Football Institute, School of Sport, Tourism and the Outdoors Room 152,
Greenbank Building, University of Central Lancashire, Preston, PR1 2HE. Closing Date 20th May 2011.

Cross-posting some of my recent(ish) Wellcome Library blog posts

2011-05-04T11:44:00.000+01:00

The annual archive popularity contest

A woman in wartime: Molly Newhouse

Roger Money-Kyrle papers

The last is particularly gratifying: this is an important collection which I am very glad to see catalogued and out there at last.

Catching up on journal literature I

2011-05-02T21:15:00.000+01:00

Trying to dig up and read articles relevant to the revision of Sex, Gender, and Social Change. So far:

Jenny Birchall, ''The Carnival Revels of Manchester's Vagabonds': Young Working-class Women and Monkey Parades in the 1870s', Women's History Review, 2006, 15: 2, 229-252.
Useful piece on the anxieties of new urban spaces and the use of urban spaces, class mixing and mingling, women in public etc. It focuses on one street in Manchester, which with its new shopping emporia was creating concerns over middle-class shopping or simply window-shopping women, as well as the evening-time presence of young people of a lower class engaged in courtship behaviour, or encounters intended to lead to courtship. It sounds as if the young working-class women were as much about seeking a place to display their stylish finery as to cop off with young men. It also strikes me that as a community practice the the 'monkey-walk' did facilitate getting to know members of the opposite sex in a collective setting, which must have had an element of safety about it. And that just because the young women gave as good as they got verbally didn't mean that, even by middle-class standards, they were actually immoral in their behaviour.

Stephen Garton, 'The scales of suffering: Love, death and Victorian masculinity', Social History, 2002, 27: 1, 40-58. I
Interesting, but very close-focus study of the diaries of a late C19th Australian doctor and general activist in various fields, with particular reference to his mourning of his wife in them over a prolonged period. A useful contribution to our understanding of the fractures within Victorian middle-class masculinity but a bit narrow - is there any comparative work (he does cite Tosh on Victorian manhood). It predates Julie-Marie Strange's work Death, Grief and Poverty in Britain, 1870-1914 (and now out in paperback!)

Nicky Hallett, Lesbian Lives: Identity and Auto/Biography in the Twentieth Century (1999)

2011-04-25T21:01:00.003+01:00

This book is perfectly okay for what it does, but I'm not sure it's a book of particular relevance to my particular purposes at this moment. It's much more about lesbian representation/self-representation in various texts. In some cases I was not entirely persuaded that certain imagery clusters or tropes are quite as specific to woman-woman relationships as she suggests, or at least, I would have liked a bit of compare/contrast as to how certain metaphors played out differently in self-consciously lesbian texts.

It was published before work by Laura Doan, Alison Oram, Martha Vicinus and Deborah Cohler which have substantially nuanced our own understanding of historical understandings of female same-sex desire and relationships and lesbian self-fashioning, and significantly queried the extent to which sexological categories were in play.

It contains a confusing citation to a work of 1928 on Sexual Inversion by John Addington Symonds as if this were contemporaneous with The Well of Loneliness and JAS suffering from 'the paranoia of the imperialist' apropos homosexuality (rather than an early homophile advocate). Whatever text it was that was published in New York in 1928, and reprinted in 1984, if it was really by JAS it was written before 1893 (when he died) and one would like to know why, how, and by whom it was being republished at that date, given that Symonds' family and literary executors had taken enormous pains to persuade Havelock Ellis to remove the traces of Symonds' collaboration from their jointly-authored version of Sexual Inversion. It appears to have been the volume Studies in Sexual Inversion Embodying a Study in Greek Ethics and a Study in Modern Ethics published in 1928, but I am not sure what the impetus was behind issuing an omnibus edition. This was one of a number of points where I felt the close-reading focus was perhaps leaving out significant contextual matter or chronology. But that may be to do with the sort of thing I am looking for at the moment.

Stella Browne: some family background stuff

2011-04-21T21:30:00.000+01:00

Her grandfather, William Lindsay Browne, was in the Navy, served in the first Opium War in 1842 and was awarded a campaign medal. He was also employed on anti-slave trade patrols during the 1820s and a range of other duties throughout the range of the British Empire, literally from China to Peru. William's father and grandfather were RN men also, it is believed: his grandfather died in the defence of Savannah during the American War of Independence, and his father served with great distinction during the Napoleonic period.

Maybe this was why she found the Battle of Jutland so inspiring, or so she wrote to Margaret Sanger in 1916:

the news of the North Sea Battle makes me feel very British again. That cruiser squadron which fought the whole German High Sea Fleet for seven hours, till Jellicoe's main squadron came along, and the Germans bolted for Kiel!

although she followed this outbreak of enthusiasm with the perhaps more characteristic comment:

all the men dead and on both sides: and for what? Junker tyranny over there and Northcliffe dictatorship here--or so it seems.

Voluntary action history

2011-04-19T14:00:00.000+01:00

Yesterday I attended an event run by the Voluntary Action History Society to celebrate its 20th anniversary and launch two books in the area recently published.

Take-away thoughts:

How very broad the remit is, once one considers that it includes mutual aid initiatives as well as philanthropy, and in both area covers a huge range of endeavours (two things that wouldn't have immediately sprung to my own mind were adult education and restoration of waterways).

How very cynical/perturbed historians who actually work on voluntary action are about the nostalgic and simplistic invocation of 'volunteerism' by the current government and how complex and intricately imbricated relations between state and voluntarism have been.

Is it really true that the British concept of voluntary action has been widely exported (outside the bits that used to part of the Empire)? The call for more transnational work might nuance that considerably.

Made the point myself about the endangered status of archives of voluntary bodies. There is no statutory obligation on such bodies to retain records, they may not have permanent offices (and the early informal stages at their inception may well be very sparsely documented), they may be subject to recurrent 'clear-outs', the historical significance of their documentation is not necessarily recognised. Also, except in certain subject areas (e.g. the Wellcome Library for health-related organisations) or for locally-based bodies (in which the local record office may be interested), there is often no obvious repository which might be acquiring them.

More undiscovered Stella Browne

2011-04-17T17:25:00.000+01:00

A correspondent has very kindly drawn my attention to (and sent me a copy of) a letter written by Stella to Alex Comfort in February 1951, praising his Authority & Deliquency in the Modern State and a letter he had written to the New Statesman about the Society for Social Responsibility in Science. She compares his work with that of Wilhelm Reich - she wrote enthusiatically about Reich and the Sex-Pol group during the 1930s.

It is clear from what she writes to Comfort that she was missing London very much, and finding Merseyside very uncongenial - it had always been in my mind that somewhere with such a high Irish/Roman Catholic demographic would probably not have been somewhere she found very sympathetic and this letter confirms that supposition. She also mourns the decline of 'The more enlightened principled and responsible big “industrials”' of the city, by which I take her to mean families such as the Rathbones who were using their wealth in philanthropy and social activism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

As was suggested by her slightly earlier letter to Olaf Stapledon in 1949, she found the work for peace one of the most pressing issues of the present time.

A very welcome addition to my knowledge of a relatively sparsely documented period of her life.

Insights session reprise

2011-04-14T17:30:00.000+01:00

This Insights on Women, Health and Healing will be reprised at the Wellcome Library at 18.00-19.00 hrs.

Barbara Tate, West End Girls: the real lives, loves and friendships of 1940s Soho and its working girls

2011-04-12T20:19:00.003+01:00

This was a wonderful little study of the world of Soho prostitution in the late 1940s, by someone who became quite by chance a 'participant observer' through working as a prostitute's maid. This, it's clear, was necessitated by the laws on brothels (i.e. more than one prostitute working out of the same premises) and poncing - a man would have been assumed to be living on immoral earnings. Someone to take the money and look after it and be a deterrent to the client getting violent or trying to get away without paying. Also to run out and buy condoms etc as necessary.

Things notable: the sheer daily turnover of business, well into double figures, in really sordid surroundings - even after Babs had cleaned and tidied Mae's premises it all sounds very basic and lacking in amenities. And clearly, the act itself was no frills and over fast - use of pornographic postcards to get them rapidly to the point, and later, the two-way mirror for voyeurism. Use of condoms (gossiping against other prostitutes tended to invoke not using them). Men waiting their turn in the kitchen. Oral sex doesn't seem to have featured, except as something that, again, was an accusation against someone else ('takes it in her mouth'. Mae did do quite a lot of kinky trade, even having several masochists at a time tied up in various corners of the flat. But not all of them did.

Distinctions between Soho and other areas such as Shepherd Market - the girls were independent operators who lived outside the area and commuted in to their Soho flats. Elsewhere the ponces owned the flats and put girls in them. In Soho the ponces weren't involved with the business (except for, in many probably most cases, exploiting the girls they were in a relationship with) and they liked to live right outside the district so as not to fall foul of the police.

The police had a worked out system of the women being taken to court and fined at regular intervals. But in between they would be let alone. Even though the women tended not to solicit actively but just stand around, glance, jangle their keys, or possibly mention a 'nice time' - some of them were, it sounds, more aggressive than that - but on the whole they didn't need to.

Mae seems to have been getting round about £1 a time, at least to start with, for the straight act, and Babs was getting a tip of around 2/6 on that.

This more or less meshes with other evidence on the subject.

Reproduction and the Sciences, Cambridge, 8 April, conference notes

2011-04-10T17:23:00.001+01:00

This was an excellent and remarkably wide-ranging conference given the apparently delimited conference theme. For example, the trade in bodies and body parts around the turn of the C19th/C20th both as to how anatomists obtained them and the intraprofessional trade system. Or the importance of marsupial reproductive biology and its cryptic nature (at least from a mammalian perspective) in the development of anthropology in the earlier part of the C20th and the pre-eminent theme of kinship therein.

One thing that segued from paper to paper was the significance of networks, and the importance of women (often without any formal academic/official position, and not infrequently occluded in the later narratives) within those networks. And on women, one thing that came out of the paper on anthropology was the impact of late C20th reproductive technology (IVF etc) on reviving Kinship Studies (previously, while fatherhood had been conceived as a social construction, maternity was still pretty much essentialised and seen as 'natural').

Life-cycle narrative themes: why did Sir Alan Parkes return to Cambridge very late in life. What were the facts. ma'am, about Robert Edwards, Patrick Steptoe and the development of IVF as opposed to Edwards' several versions about how and when they met and their mutual influence.

The full programme is here.

Reproduction and the Sciences

2011-04-07T21:42:00.000+01:00

Am in Cambridge, to attend this conference.

It feels slightly weird, and also rather restful, to be attending a conference I'm not actually speaking at, after something of a flurry of the latter.

Marcus Collins, Modern Love: An Intimate History of Men and Women in Twentieth Century Britain

2011-04-06T20:52:00.002+01:00

Okay, it's not really an 'intimate history' in the way that Szreter and Fisher's Sex before the Sexual Revolution is, or Kate Fisher's early work on birth control, or even, dare I venture, my own Hidden Anxieties. It's a touch distanced, it's more about rhetoric and reports and representations than lived (hetero)sexual experence.

There are some good useful case-studies in this book. Collins has delved into the archives of organisations offering various forms of marital counselling to rather different constituencies in more or less the immediately post-war era (though he doesn't seem to know that the Marriage Guidance Council started in the 1930s, though it went on hiatus during the early war years), and found some fascinating material. I also greatly liked his investigation into the phenomena of same-sex and mixed sex youth clubs and the shifts and changes and unforeseen outcomes of various developments (though is he serious about somewhat marking down girls in the 50s for not somehow militantly reclaiming the space within mixed clubs that was taken over by boys and their interests?) But there's valuable material there. His analysis of the short period in the rise of glossy soft-porn men's mags when they were pro some kind of women's lib is intriguing, particularly in the light of some of the material in Mort's Capital Offenses about new ideas of womanhood.

However, I am not convinced by his rather rigid lump categorisation of people writing about marriage. I'm not sure 'radical feminism' is a helpful way of thinking about social purity feminism (which was hardly monolithic), and I am simply bewildered by the people he plonks into the interwar classifications of 'Christian mutualists' and 'sex reformers'. Given that quite a lot of the mutualists were not Christian (Collins specifically describes the secularist, Jewish by origin, Eustace Chesser, as a 'Christian': and there were elements in Chesser's rather diverse agenda which allied him with the interwar sex reformers as much as with e.g. Griffith or Mace of the Marriage Guidance Council) and that some of the prominent 'reformers' were just as much about mutualism, but a mutualism of both partners having other lovers, this seems unduly simplistic, even as a heuristic device.

Also, it's all very hetero, which is perhaps reasonable, but if you are looking at mutualism, a case can be made that writers on marriage were often quite benign on the subject of female-female couples, who were seen as embodying an ideal egalitarian form of relationship. This focus becomes particularly egregious in the concluding section, given that the C21st has seen, it may be argued, the spreading of the mutualist couple ideal to same-sex couples via civil partnership. I also felt the work as a whole rather ignored the impact on sexual mores of STDs - the burgeoning sexual revolution of the 60s/70s was underpinned by penicillin as much as the Pill, and the retreat from it from the early 80s surely owed something to the rise of herpes, the AIDS/HIV panic, the awareness of a range of other STDs, and the development of the paradism of safe, or safer sex.

However, useful, both for the case studies, and for provoking thoughts and ideas around the subject.

Slightly behindhand with this

2011-04-04T13:43:00.000+01:00

I intended to post on Saturday for the centenary of the Great Census Boycott of 1911 undertaken by suffragettes as an act of protest. There was a piece in the Guardian on Friday, and on the Saturday there was a guided walk of Kensington under the auspices of the Women's Library.

My own impression has been that it was largely an action of the Women's Freedom League in line with their policy of non-violent (but nonetheless significantly disruptive) protests, but it does seem to have extended well beyond that particular organisation.

There is a nice story by Laurence Housman, the male suffragist, playwright and sex reformer, about leaving his own residence for census night so that an interdeterminate number of women suffragists could stay there. They had departed by the time he returned, but left him a cooked breakfast.

Frank Mort, Capital Affairs: The Making of the Permissive Society (2010)

2011-04-03T17:08:00.003+01:00

This was an excellent book, and I found it a compelling read (I came across a couple of reviews in the mainstream press which accused it of having swathes of academic theoretical jargon and either they have a very low tolerance for the slightest degree of theoretical analysis and just wanted more scandal and sensationalism, or I have become desensitised over the course of the years). It does some extremely useful things, not least of which is to draw attention to the continuing significance of class alongside sex and race in the issues under discussion.

It also drew attention to reconstructions of masculinity - and the continuation of certain forms of elite homosociability - in the period under discussion, which both hearked back, at least stylistically, to earlier periods, and incorporated elements of modernity. This productive intersection between the modern and tradition also feature strongly in the discussion of continuities and changes in the specific urban spaces of Soho.

Obviously there is a lot more that could be written about the 50s/early 60s, that period of apparent deadly conformity and tremblors of instability every so often shaking the complacent surface, but this is a solid and focused study that by its concentration shines spotlights into hitherto underexplored areas.

Still thinking through many of the points it raises.

Probably rather brief media appearance

2011-04-01T10:19:00.000+01:00

Last year I recorded an interview for this programme, BBC4: Time Shift: Crime and Punishment - The Story of Corporal Punishment.

As they've just rung me up to alert me to its being shown on Monday at 9 pm, I guess they've included at least some of my thoughts on the subject.

A quote a day for Women's History Month: 31st March

2011-03-31T15:40:00.001+01:00

[T]he wound is healed, the secret told, the riddle becomes plain, the reconciliation is made between man and what surrounds him. Each happening depends on the other. But if it was for all time, the flowers might go on blooming but the spirit would wither. It would be sad beyond all telling if the finding of the Grail were to happen once for all. Because then it could not happen again for anyone.
Naomi Mitchison, To The Chapel Perilous (1955)

Finishing up the month with my beloved Naomi Mitchison, and possibly my favourite of her works, although it's really impossible to choose. My short bio-critical study of her is still available from Aqueduct Press, and she does seem to be garnering, finally, some degree of scholarly attention. I will concede that such a prolific writer in such varied genres, and dedicated social activist in so many diverse fields, is something of a daunting prospect. Also, it continues less than easy to obtain most of her works, though kudos to Kennedy and Boyd for the Naomi Mitchison Library and Naomi Mitchison - Essays and Journalism series bringing some of her works back into print and collecting her scattered essays and journalism.

A quote a day for Women's History Month: 30th March

2011-03-30T20:07:00.000+01:00

I much prefer being as I am now. I have a much larger capacity for everything. I see a lot more and care a lot less about things like people and whether they like me.
M F K Fisher, From the Journals of M F K Fisher, entry for 3 July 1940.

Talking about Stella Browne

2011-03-29T17:30:00.000+01:00

6.30 pm at Bookmarks Bookshop, Bloomsbury Street, London, WC1B 3QE
FREE ENTRY
Call 020 7637 1848 or email to reserve your place.

A quote a day for Women's History Month: 29th March

2011-03-29T13:31:00.000+01:00

Supposing it was true that Lorna, regarded soberly and dispassionately, was a vain, hypocritical, super-rayfeened bitch: had these shortcomings prevented them from having twenty years of good times together? Maybe it was the difference in their faults rather than the similarity of their virtues that bound them together.
Dawn Powell, The Locusts Have No King (1948)

I found it very hard to choose one quote from Dawn Powell, as I don't think there's a book of hers I've read that doesn't have numerous pages flagged up for some particularly incisive passage. The rediscovery of Powell's remarkable novels, their republication, the issue of edited selections from her diaries and letters, and the production of a biography, is largely owing to the work of Tim Holt to bring her back into recognition. K

And elsewhere

2011-03-29T10:48:00.000+01:00

Listen again link to discussion on Victorian prostitution in which I participated yesterday evening on BBC Radio 3 Nightwaves.

And my most recent contribution to the Wellcome Library blog from last week.

A quote a day for Women's History Month: 28th March

2011-03-28T18:12:00.000+01:00

These two women care for each other more than they care for any man. They are bound together by a curious feeling about men, a sort of muffled contempt, a mixture of mild antagonism and irritated sympathy, and they have an obscure stifled feeling of impatience with an instinct in themselves which draws them to men.

Mary Borden, Flamingo (1927)

I see that someone has now, quite recently (2009) produced a biography of Borden, further details on this website here. Borden sounds like a fascinating character, but I'm not sure her novels have lasted very well, on the basis of the ones I've read.

A quote a day for Women's History Month: 27th March

2011-03-27T13:15:00.000+01:00

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.
Edna St Vincent Millay, 'Dirge Without Music', from The Buck in the Snow (1928)

In memoriam for that wonderful writer Diana Wynne Jones, who died yesterday.